The Logics and Limits of (Russia’s) Soft Power

• In Event: Politicians, Governments, and Their Strategic Communication

Abstract

Soft power is rooted in the underlying visions of the Western liberal school of political thought that brought it into being in the early 1990s. Increasingly, however, critical scholarship questions the universalist presumptions of soft power discourse. This article fits into such recent efforts to offer non-Western perspectives on diplomacy and soft power strategies as examples of legitimate systems that nevertheless do not emulate of the West.
Through a detailed elaboration of Russia’s foreign policy discourse over the last two decades, we trace the emergence of the terminology of soft power and public diplomacy in Russia and the logics and limits of these concepts as they are put into practice. We ask whether soft power is an expression of Western notions of modernity and whether we need to consider alternative conceptions of soft power, local versions that look different in different geopolitical spaces.

Authors

• Stanislav Budnitskiy, Carleton University

• Melissa Aronczyk, Rutgers U