ABSTRACT
Introduction The concept of ‘soft power’, coined by Joseph Nye in 1990, has been widely applied as a resource for public diplomacy and image cultivation by state actors, as well as widely debated by scholars mainly in the fields of international relations and international communication. Like any other power forms, soft power aims to exercise influence on others and to get preferred outcomes. The difference is that soft power achieves these goals through attractiveness rather than coercion, payments or inducement (Nye 1990). As Nye states, soft power attempts to win people’s minds and hearts per se. In the political domain, soft power is considered as a preference to accommodate the new politics approach in the realm of the noösphere – noöpolitik – that refers to an approach to diplomacy and strategy for the information age that emphasizes the shaping and sharing of ideas, values, norms, laws, and ethics through soft power (Ronfeldt and Arquilla 2009, p. 357).
