The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power (2023) is a comprehensive overview of soft power theory and practice. It reframes soft power as a dynamic process shaped by intention, audience, and experience.

FULL SUMMARY

About the Authors:
Each chapter has a different author, and the main editors are:
Naren J. Chitty
Founding Director of the Soft Power Analysis and Resource Centre (SPARC) at Macquarie University, Australia. Chitty is a pioneer in soft power research, with a background in international communication and public diplomacy.
Li Ji
Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Renmin University of China. Li specializes in media studies, public diplomacy, and soft power metrics, with a focus on China’s global image and strategic communication.
Craig Hayden
Professor at Marine Corps University in the U.S. and an expert in public diplomacy, strategic communication, and international broadcasting. His work often examines U.S. foreign policy and the institutional practice of soft power through media and diplomacy.

Definitions of Soft Power

Soft power has been criticized for being a ‘fuzzy term’, so we list a few definitions:

in Nye’s words (2004, p. 6): ‘Simply put, in behavioral terms soft power is attractive power’.

A simple definition of soft power, quoting Joseph Nye (2021, p. 201):

‘Hard power is push; soft power is pull’.

Not everyone agrees the definition is fuzzy though:

One of the mistakes often made when defining the concept of soft power is to argue that it is an all-encompassing term; it is not. It can be considered a pull factor associated with ‘legitimate agenda setting, persuasion, the attractiveness of values’ and the ‘impression of kindness, competence or charisma’; this stands in contrast to hard power, which functions as a push factor, employing the ‘use of force, payment and some agenda-setting based on it’

However, the difference between soft and hard power is not always obvious:

However, soft and hard power resources are not as clear-cut and distinguishable as they may initially seem. They vary along a spectrum.
The actor who generates soft power is also not always clear-cut.
Hard power resources can generate soft power outcomes (Nye 2021, p. 201).

Soft power, first coined by Joseph Nye, is defined as ‘the ability to affect others through the cooptive means of framing the agenda, persuading, and eliciting positive attraction in order to obtain preferred outcomes’ (2011a, pp. 20–21).
By contrast with hard power, Nye (2004) claims that soft power gets the desired outcomes through attraction rather than coercion or payments.

‘hard power threatens, soft power seduces. Hard power dissuades; soft power persuades’ (Fraser 2003, p. 10)

Soft power is ‘a synonym for all state-led activities in the international realm that do not involve military force’ (Flew 2016, p. 290)

Shared Identity Is About (Soft) Power

Another fraught issue relates to power relations and deciding what constitutes cultural heritage. Given that power plays an essential role in the construction of heritage, symbols relating to the identity of the dominant cultural group often determine what constitutes shared heritage. This occurs often to the exclusion of the other identities, and decisions to exclude the heritage of ‘others’ within a community are not random, as parties often clash over such decisions (Blake 2015, p. 284).

Taking a Measure of Attraction-Based Influence

This opening chapter introduces the theoretical perspectives on soft power, framing it as attraction-based influence.
It highlights the challenge of measuring its intangible nature compared to metrics like GDP and setting the stage for deeper theoretical discussions.

• Soft power centers on attraction and persuasion, distinct from hard power.
• Measuring soft power is difficult due to its intangibility.

Soft ‘depends’ more on the target

[S]uccess in terms of outcomes is more in the control of the target than is often the case with hard power’ (Nye 2011, p. 83). Messages are refracted, accepted, or rejected through interpretation (Hall 1980). ‘Derridean interpretation is specifically counter-intentional. As Derrida explains in Dissemination, the deconstructive “reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer”’ (Hogan 1990, p. 52).

The Gift of Grace: Soft Power, Charisma, and Transatlantic Relations

Ohnesorge explores charisma as a vital soft power component, focusing on transatlantic relations between Germany and the United States.

Drawing on Max Weber’s concept of charisma, the chapter positions charismatic leaders as agents who amplify national attractiveness.

It illustrates how U.S. presidents’ charisma has shaped transatlantic ties, both positively and negatively, providing a fresh lens on soft power’s personal dimension.

• Charisma boosts soft power by inspiring admiration.
• Charismatic men tend to lead during ‘moments of distress’ called ‘Charismatic Situation, (M Rainer Lepsius (1993, pp. 100–101)
  • External circumstances and results also contributes to charismatic leaders’ demise: Napoleon forfeited a considerable share of his personal charisma after Waterloo (Ohnesorge 2020, p. 123)
• Today charisma and soft power can be closely tied to oratory
• Charisma and soft power can be used for good or for ‘bad’. Osama Bin Laden was charismatic: he didn’t recruit followers with coercion and neither did he pay them
• Different audiences find different traits and people charismatic

Measuring Soft Power: Quantitative Analyses & Results

Irene Wu addresses the challenge of measuring soft power.

The chapter introduces the “Soft Power Rubric,” which tracks behaviors like foreign public opinion and cross-border engagement, offering a practical framework for assessing soft power’s effects.

• Quantitative tools measure soft power through behaviors.
• Foreign public opinion creates foreign policy opportunities:
  • Goldsmith and Horiuchi (2012) show that countries with a high opinion of US foreign policy were far more likely to send troops to join the United States in Iraq.
  • Countries with soft power win more cooperation from and increased trade with other countries. Further, they attract more students, tourists, and foreign direct investment.
• Coca Cola and Starbucks grew despite negative American sentiment (Datta, 2014), but visits to the US and studying to the US were significantly correlated to a favorable/unfavorable view of the US
• The more a soft-power a country has, the more it exports (Rose, 2016) His 2016 study concludes that if an importer perceives an exporting country to be a positive influence in the world, then the importer buys more from that country, holding constant other factors such as common language, common land border, membership in the same regional trade agreement or currency union, and a former colonial relationship. Rose (2016) concludes that a 1 percent increase in perceived positive influence raises exports by about 0.8 percent.
• The effect of sanctions on exports is smaller than soft power
• Takeaway: For countries interested in growing their soft power resources, the policy implications are to open their societies to more social interaction with foreigners, immigrants, international students, visitors, and foreign media. Opening up more, of course, may mean that their own society may change as a result.

Measuring Soft Power Is Difficult (Li Ji)

Li Ji tackles the difficulty of measuring soft power’s intangible effects, proposing an audience-centered framework.

The presumption of soft power effects is that soft power will be effective on subjects if they are attractive, charming, credible and trustworthy, in line with a range of behaviours (e.g. framing, agenda-setting and attraction) conducted by agents.

• Soft power’s intangibility complicates measurement.
• Framing analysis assesses audience perceptions.

The Use of the Soft Power Concept in Empirical Studies

Novelli and Pereira critique soft power’s application in empirical research, noting deficiencies in defining goals, audiences, and causal mechanisms.

• Empirical studies often lack clear soft power definitions.
• Soft power is highly contextual when it comes to effectiveness
• Many studies on soft power are of low quality

Our systematic analysis of empirical studies that employ the concept of soft power confirmed expected shortcomings in the use of the concept.
The most common problem was the vagueness regarding the causal mechanisms in action, i.e., how resources produce soft power, and how this soft power could be used to achieve political goals.
Even among studies that addressed conversion mechanisms, a common approach was to only address how resources are converted into soft power, overlooking how a given state could accomplish a certain goal through this soft power – that when goals were even set out at all.

Russia’s Authoritarianism Can Help Its Soft Power

The authors critique simplistic approaches that claim that framing the Russian state as authoritarian necessarily disempowers Russia’s soft power:

However, these premises seem to ignore a fundamental point: the authoritarian values associated with the Russian government may be attractive to certain audiences. Authors such as Jackson (2010), Ferguson (2012), Wilson (2015a), and Horvath (2016) have demonstrated how Russia’s strategies for Central Asia, largely focused on proposing alternatives to Western models and values, have garnered support from local elites precisely because of their authoritarian content. Concurrently, these same strategies have yielded far worse results in Eastern Europe, where Russia’s political model and values do not seem to be as effective in the eyes of increasingly pro-European Union domestic elites (Saari 2014).

A Study of Soft Power Rankings: Concepts, Method(ology), and Evaluation

Wang evaluates soft power rankings, analyzing five major projects’ methodologies, but

advocating for improved ranking methods to capture soft power’s nuances.

• Rankings vary in criteria and subjectivity.
• There is only limited strategic value for investing in soft power resources for purposes of growing influence. All rankers failed to show causality between known soft power qualities and efficiency of strategic deployment of soft power strategies in terms of achieving intended outcomes
• a soft-power measure that is credible to all, applicable to every country whatever the circumstances, is perhaps outside the realm of possibility. This does not mean the quest is useless. Indeed, it has value

States vs. Tech Giants: Who Is Wielding Soft Power?

Massa and Anzera explore the rivalry between states and tech giants in wielding soft power via online platforms.
Tech companies’ information control challenges state influence, urging adaptive strategies to maintain national soft power.

• Tech giants rival states in digital soft power.
• Tech giants promote many Western values, even with their platforms’ rules and regulations, based on copyrights, and running on ads/capitalism
• Platform exercise ‘invisible form of power’ in selecting what to promote: The most relevant case is algorithms, those computational mechanisms involved in selecting and hierarchizing content and preferences on behalf of users. 
• States must adapt to retain influence.

It’s a MAD World: Mutually Assured Delegitimization

Manor examines how diplomats’ online crisis framing can lead to mutual delegitimization.

When states engage in mutual delegitimization on social media, as seen in the 2014 Gaza War and Crimean Crisis, they may both suffer soft disempowerment. This dynamic leads to what the chapter terms MAD—Mutually Assured Delegitimization: a lose-lose scenario where all parties involved undermine their own credibility and soft power.

• Studies demonstrate that during crises, states use social media to create normative contrasts and to demonstrate an adversary’s lack of adherence with accepted norms and ideals (Manor and Crilley, 2018a; Manor and Crilley, 2018b)
• ‘Soft disempowerment’ refers to ‘actions, inactions and/or policies of a state that ultimately upset, offend or alienate others, leading to a loss of credibility and attractiveness’ (Brannagan and Giulianotti, 2015, pp. 1152–1153)
  • Violation of laws and rules, typically exposed by the press (e.g., Qatar’s bribery scandal during its World Cup bid).
  • Failure to uphold global norms and conventions, often highlighted by NGOs (e.g., Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers).
• Social power is the ability to set standards, and create norms and ideals, that are deemed as both legitimate and desirable by the international community, without resorting to coercion or payment (Van Ham, 2013). 

Soft Power of First Ladies

Marczuk investigates First Ladies’ soft power roles in France and Poland, showing how their activities complement diplomacy.
First ladies’ ‘job’ is to strengthen their presidential spouse’s credibility.

The three powers of first ladies are:

1. Benign Power – Generated through kindness, compassion, and charitable engagement. First Ladies display this by supporting vulnerable groups, advocating for social issues like women’s rights, and acting as social activists or goodwill ambassadors.
2. Brilliant Power – Arises from prestige, competence, and refined conduct. This is seen when First Ladies demonstrate diplomatic skill, charm, and etiquette in roles such as companion, aesthete, or surrogate during state visits.
3. Beautiful Power – Refers to moral beauty or charisma rooted in values, not appearance. It is displayed when First Ladies inspire through international roles, promoting cultural respect, credibility, and goodwill abroad.

I would have liked to see more evidence-backed analyses of first ladies’ effects, including possible negative effects on their husbands.
For example:

MORE WISDOM

• Trump sapped US’ soft power

a reversed trend can be observed in the wake of the inauguration of Donald Trump, in whom Germans, in particular, had very little confidence (11% in 2017; 10% in 2018). Impressively attesting to the significance of the personality factor in soft power, the opinion of the United States declined during the same period of time from 57% in 2016 (Obama’s last full year in office) to 35% in 2017 and 30% in 2018 (Trump’s first two years in the White House). Trump, in short, was deeply harmful to the US image in Germany, and consequently – and contrary to his grandiose rhetoric – he did make America a good deal weaker in terms of its soft power, at least vis-à-vis Germany.

Also read more in our article:

• How Trump makes US weaker and EU stronger

• Cultural heritage reflects national identity as a soft power tool.
• Digitalization is a double-edged sword for states: it allows for more connectivity, but it reduces soft power control
• National brand is… : As a “mental image of the country held by foreign people,” a nation brand is “the total sum of all perceptions of a nation in the minds of international stakeholders, which may contain some of the following elements: people, place, culture/language, history, food, fashion, famous faces (celebrities), global brands and so on” (Fan 2010, p. 98).
• Covid quickly reshaped countries’ ‘national brand’, framing effective crisis management as a civic virtue. Trust, transparency, and cooperation enhanced nations’ images. Korea and Taiwan emerged as leaders. Donations later boosted donors’ soft power, including for Russia.
  Later on bigger powers who developed and shared vaccines took the lead transitioning from medical diplomacy to pandemic soft power, offering insights into health crises
• The contact hypothesis (e.g., Pettigrew & Tropp 2006) proposed that increased interaction between people increases mutual understanding and decreases prejudice.
  • However, as Allport (1954) explained, reducing anxiety and prejudice and increasing empathy, requires conditions of contact such as equal status, common goals, and cooperation, otherwise…
  • Casual, and superficial contact will result in stereotyping.
• Apologizing is crucial to mending relationships: The most frequent reasons given by those with a negative impression of Japan were that the Japanese had not apologized and reflected on their history of invading China (77.5%) 

QUOTES

A popular quote on ‘power VS influence’:

All power is influence but not all influence is power, power being intended influence (Lasswell & Kaplan 1950)

We also agree with Bertrand Russell (1938):

Power has many forms, such as wealth, armaments, civil authority, influence on opinion.
No one of these can be regarded as subordinate to any other, and there is no one form from which the others are derivative. The attempt to treat one form of power, say wealth, in isolation, can only be partially successful.

On soft power being in the hands of the followers, quoting Bryan R Wilson (1975, p. 5):

an illustrative example of the mandatory provision of such a followship, ‘If a man runs naked down the street proclaiming that he alone can save others from impending doom, and if he immediately wins a following, then he is a charismatic leader: a social relationship has come into being. If he does not win a following, he is simply a lunatic’.

On the ‘dark’ power of soft power:

Sure, he has a lot of soft power. He proved this when he brought down the Twin Towers. Bin Laden did not hold a gun to the heads of the people who flew the planes. He did not pay them either. They did it because they were attracted by his convictions.

Social media empower individuals and disempower journalists:

The interaction of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media goes beyond international broadcasting. If the adoption of social media is disempowering for journalists and news organisations, by virtue of disintermediation, publics have been empowered to engage with foreign policy issues in innovative ways. 

On Germany’s great reputation:

German soft power has made foreign leaders and publics confident that ‘Germany will do the right thing’.

On the need for cooperation in global challenges:

To borrow the analogy used by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1941 Lend Lease Act, you should lend your neighbours your garden hose if their house is on fire and thereby keep the fire from spreading to your house.

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s Analysis

Please note these aren’t as much about the book itself, which is excellent, but more about the state of international relations in general:

I wished for more evidence, less philosophy

The early chapters are overly reliant on philosophical perspectives and theoretical contributions from individual thinkers, with limited empirical support.

The references to Max Weber, Kant, Aristotle, or Foucault aren’t what I usually look for in a handbook.
There was also Machiavelli, and we love the construct here—but it’s still not empirical evidence.

This risks portraying, or even showing, soft power as a largely conceptual construct, rather than one grounded in evidence or data.
Unfortunately, this may be exactly the case, and it’s something I’ve noticed for international relations in general.

Some Conflicting Claims Left Me Wishing For More Consensus

While some chapters claimed a relationship between soft power and some measures of a state’s success, others claimed a lack of causality between soft power, and achieving intended outcomes.

Somehow, I felt the latter was more correct, casting some questions about the state of the research literature in political science.

Interesting Speculations & Questions, But Few Answers

Compared to more mature social sciences like psychology, I found soft power research (and international relations in general) to provide fewer ‘answers’.

For example, if you read a handbook on persuasion, you can walk away with many strategies and techniques to craft your messages for higher persuasion.

But if you were a top politician, a handbook on political science may not give you the same clarity on how to do a better job.

REVIEW

The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power stands as the first and currently unique multi-author book on soft power.

I’m thankful to the authors, glad I could read it, and I learned from it.

However, I can’t deny I was hoping for something more ‘concrete’.
What left me wanting more was not the handbook—authored by many accomplished scholars—but the state of the field itself. It feels relatively underdeveloped and still in need of a broader, more mature body of empirical research.

I look forward to their future work when stronger empirical foundations will hopefully yield more practical insights.

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