Suchergebnisse

In the modern world, education traditionally acts as an institution of knowledge transfer. At the same time, in a multipolar world, the role of education has expanded significantly. It is firmly included in the foreign policy arsenal of a number of states, being an integral component and form of their foreign policy strategy. The article examines the approaches of a number of foreign political scientists to the problem of defining education as one of the instruments of "soft power" policy. The Republic of Moldova has taken the concept of "soft power" with interest as a real tool of political influence in the international arena. Moldovan authors consider European policy in the context of Moldova's participation in the Bologna process. All this suggests that the problem under consideration requires further study and conceptualization.

By trading upon the principles of South-South cooperation, Brazil is widely viewed as having gained a positive image worldwide. Brazil's South-South development cooperation was one of the foreign policy instruments it used to raise this profile. However, studies of the generation of soft power are still lacking in the international relations literature,and where empirical research exists it focuses more on the results of soft power strategies than on how soft power is created. Therefore,this article explores how Brazil's soft power strategy is conceptualized in Brazil's development cooperation discourse and how it is operationalized through South-South development activities. This research uses a triangulation method combining the analysis of official documents, academic studies and interviews to conclude that the Brazilian government under President Lula (2003-2011) influenced the organization of its cooperation agency and guided it towards sectors and targets that contribute to the creation of positive outcomes. This article contributes to the debate on the state's behavior in soft power, that is, the 'behavior' of the Brazilian government in the design of its cooperation agency's activities,thus also contributing to knowledge about the relationship between an agent's behavior and the outcomes of a country's policy of 'soft empowerment'.

Asymmetrical power relations and India's contested leadership in South Asia are two major impediments to ensuring peace and stability in, and integration of, the region. After having unsuccessfully tested the hard power approach to impose its will in the region, India has turned towards soft power. It now tries to rebuild its positive image in the region and attract more neighbours into a vision of shared prosperity and peace through soft power. This essay presents an overview of the most recent initiatives aimed at improving India's soft power in its neighbourhood and attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy. It finds that despite some flaws in this approach, it could bring tangible positive effects and has the potential to transform relations in South Asia in the long run.

"South Africa's moral authority and willingness to play an active role in the world gave it unique leverage with both the global North and the South." Eighth and final article in a series on soft power around the world.

Abstract
In the past decade, Joseph Nye's concept of soft power has become a popular tool for analysing and explaining foreign policy directions of countries that lack significant capacities of hard power. Beyond other states, Hungary has also received special attention in this regard as several surveys and indexes have measured a high increase in its soft power efficiency. This paper attempts to analyse how Hungarian domestic and external political approaches supported this assumed progress and seeks to understand how political values, governance practices and foreign policy strategies have influenced the effectiveness of Hungarian soft power. The paper will argue that the recent Hungarian political directions have produced controversial outcomes and the populist orientation has increased and, at the same time, constrained the effectiveness of soft power. It has increased because populist rhetoric has created a much larger international fame and agenda-setting capacity than would have been expected from a small Central European country. However, it has also been constrained because controversial domestic and conflicting foreign policies were rejected by the European moderate majority. As a result, today, Hungarian external policies suffer from a serious deficit of legitimacy and moral authority which significantly limit the presumed progress of soft power.

This article pushes beyond hard power and soft power to insist on smart power, defined as the capacity of an actor to combine elements of hard power and soft power in ways that are mutually reinforcing such that the actor's purposes are advanced effectively and efficiently. It argues that advancing smart power has become a national security imperative, driven both by long-term structural changes in international conditions and by short-term failures of the current administration. The current debates over public diplomacy and soft power suffer from failures to address conceptual, institutional, and political dimensions of the challenge, three dimensions the author addresses in this article. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2008 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]