ABSTRACT
Introduction Students of international relations are interested in power because it is central to understanding how nation-states relate to one another. States draw on different types of power in international relations that have been extensively discussed and theorized (Holsti 1964; Morgenthau 2006). Our contribution in this chapter is restricted to a conceptualization of a kind of power that was popularized by Joseph Nye in the early 1990s – soft power (Nye 2004, 1990). Soft power, Nye (1990, p. 166) explains, “occurs when one country gets other countries to want what it wants.” Principally, soft power depends on “attraction” rather than coercion of, or payments to, other international actors (Nye 2006). The digital revolution enabled by the internet has empowered non-state actors to be more consequential in generating and utilizing soft power on an unprecedented scale (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Castells 2012, 2007). Various ways through which soft power is generated and utilized have been examined in this volume (see Naren Chitty’s chapter on ‘Soft power, civic virtue and world politics’, for example).
