Scope, mechanism, and outcome: arguing soft power in the context of public diplomacy

Abstract

Public diplomacy connotes a range of international programmes tasked with cultivating influence for nation-states. It is typically justified within the arguments that comprise the concept of 'soft power'. Soft power, however, is a vague concept, arguably, which has been difficult to implicate as pivotal to foreign policy outcomes. Yet, despite its apparent shortcomings, the concept informs a variety of nation-state and international actors in their strategic formulations. States acting on soft power tenets via a diversity of policies suggest further attention is warranted to examine how soft power is adapted to the practice of public diplomacy among different nation-states. This article draws on Stefano Guzzini's 'performative conceptual analysis' to explore how a comparative analysis of public diplomacy can account for differing articulations of soft power, and the kinds of tools that leverage communicative and cultural resources toward expected gains. The goal is to render soft power as grounded in localised, practical understandings of strategic necessity through public diplomacy tools of statecraft. Soft power is presented as an assemblage of practical reasoning that informs linkages between strategic arguments about communication power and the practice of public diplomacy.

Discourse Power as a Means to ‘Struggle for Position’: a Critical Case Study of the Belt and Road Narrative’s Effects on Foreign Policy Formulation in the Netherlands

“…7 This prescriptive reading of soft power not only affects Western views of China's soft power, but also forces states like China and Russia to re-conceptualize soft power to adjust it to their national context [64]. Hayden illustrated how the resulting conceptual divergence between Western and Chinese soft power (termed 'cultural soft power' by Chinese leaders and scholars) leads to a divergence between practices of outward discursive engagement and public diplomacy [22,46], which in turn leads to mutual perception of soft power initiatives as ideological threats [64]. Secondly, critics argue that the traditional approach implicitly bypasses the relational dimension of power, as it downplays the subnational relationships which inform policy formulation in favour of presenting clear-cut evaluations of a country's net national soft power [5,53].…”

Reassessing Turkey’s Soft Power: The Rules of Attraction

“…The conflation of the two concepts causes further confusion of when to use the appropriate terms (Snow, 2009). Furthermore, soft power is also used as a justification for public diplomacy (Hayden, 2017). Discussions on soft power can stretch the concept to describe both soft power resources, as well as its impact.…”

Setting soft power in motion: towards a dynamic conceptual framework

“…The concept of soft power has been heavily criticised by International Relations (IR) scholars. ‘Ambiguous’ (Kearn, 2011: 66), ‘elusive’ (Feklyunina, 2016: 774), ‘fuzzy’ (Callahan, 2015: 217), ‘maddeningly inconsistent’ (Layne, 2010: 54), ‘shallow’ (Bohas, 2006) and ‘vague’ (Hayden, 2017: 34) are only a few of the terms used to express the widespread scepticism towards the concept. But if the concept is indeed so discouragingly unfit for academic service, why not dismiss it as some authors suggest (Roselle et al, 2014)?…”