ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to de-Americanise and Africanise the concept of soft power. It engages Nye’s conceptualisation of the term and observes that since its first operationalisation in his 1990 book, titled Bound to Lead, Nye has successfully used the concept to portray the United States’ subtle capacity in his numerous publications on the subject. The chapter notes that Nye’s conceptualisation is, however, biased towards the United States as it emphasises US popular culture, liberal ideals, and foreign policy behaviour. It is against this backdrop that it de-Americanises the concept by analysing the BRIC countries’ soft power whose resources (China and Russia in particular) do not exactly fit Nye’s conceptualisation. The chapter argues that these non-Western states have successfully wielded their soft power to achieve some of their foreign policy objectives. It then engages the soft power attributes of the African case studies that are not captured by Nye’s ideas. These include Nigeria’s Omolúwàbí, South Africa’s Ubuntu, Kenya’s Harambee, and Egypt’s Pharaonism.
