ABSTRACT
Analysis of the historical background to the coining of ‘soft power’ To better understand ‘soft power’ and put it into practice appropriately, we need to view it from the perspectives of international political communication and the changing discourse system (Sparks 2007; Zhao 2014), identifying how the discourses were established and how communication happened. The entangled relations between discourses and communication (Hale 2003; Baum and Groeling 2008; Durmus 2009) are like braided hairstyles, based on which the bowknot-like connection between The Clash of Civilizations? (Huntington 1993) and soft power is defined.
