Scope, mechanism, and outcome: arguing soft

power in the context of public diplomacy

Craig Hayden
School of International Service, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC
20016-8071, USA.

Public diplomacy connotes a range of international programmes tasked with cultivating

influence for nation-states. It is typically justified within the arguments that comprise the
concept of ‘soft power’. Soft power, however, is a vague concept, arguably, which has
been difficult to implicate as pivotal to foreign policy outcomes. Yet, despite its apparent
shortcomings, the concept informs a variety of nation-state and international actors in
their strategic formulations. States acting on soft power tenets via a diversity of policies
suggest further attention is warranted to examine how soft power is adapted to the practice
of public diplomacy among different nation-states. This article draws on Stefano Guzzini’s
‘performative conceptual analysis’ to explore how a comparative analysis of public diplo-
macy can account for differing articulations of soft power, and the kinds of tools that
leverage communicative and cultural resources toward expected gains. The goal is to render
soft power as grounded in localised, practical understandings of strategic necessity through
public diplomacy tools of statecraft. Soft power is presented as an assemblage of practical
reasoning that informs linkages between strategic arguments about communication power
and the practice of public diplomacy.
Journal of International Relations and Development (2017) 20, 331–357.
doi:10.1057/jird.2015.8; advance online publication, 13 March 2015
Keywords: China; conceptual analysis; public diplomacy; soft power; United States

Introduction
Public diplomacy connotes a range of international programmes tasked with
cultivating influence for nation-states. It is typically framed and justified within
arguments that comprise the concept of ‘soft power’. Soft power, however, is a
vague concept, arguably, which has been difficult to implicate as pivotal to foreign
policy outcomes (Goldsmith and Horiuchi 2012). Yet, despite its apparent short-
comings, the soft power concept has spread out from its origins as defence of the
US post-Cold War dominance to inform other nation-states and international
actors in their strategic formulations (Melissen et al. 2007; Gallarotti 2011;
Nye 2011; Pamment 2012b; Sun 2012).
Nye (2011) describes soft power as ‘the ability to get preferred outcomes through
the co-optive means of agenda-setting, persuasion, and attraction’ (16). States acting
Journal of International Relations and Development, 2017, 20, (331–357) www.palgrave.com/journals
© 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1408-6980/17
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on these tenets via a diversity of policies and strategic arguments warrant further
attention to how soft power is indigenised or adapted to the practice of public
diplomacy. This article presents an argument for how a comparative analysis of
public diplomacy practices articulates the growing significance of communication-
based imperatives to the practice of statecraft, and informs a more grounded,
practice-oriented approach to understanding soft power. The limits of soft power as
a kind of causal mechanism suggest an opportunity to consider how IR scholarship
can address and is implicated in soft power as a range of practices.
The soft power concept reflects a somewhat thin ontology of power relations
among international actors, where the processes by which ‘resources’ are translated
into influence are minimally articulated (see Lock 2010). Soft power is largely an
empty signifier; by itself, it asserts — more than it elaborates — how it can be a force
in world politics. Rather than pursue an agenda to somehow prove whether or not soft
power reflects some persistent dimension of relations of international actors the path
suggested here proposes an analytical framework to understand how soft power is
manifest as a theory of practice.
Soft power is presented here as composed of three primary aspects, scope,
mechanism, and outcome, all of which are rendered apparent in some form by the
practice of public diplomacy. These aspects reflect the means by which international
actors demonstrate the tacit knowledge about influence, communication, and their
relation to the imperatives of statecraft. This kind of knowledge is sometimes explicit
(as in the case of official discourse about public diplomacy), or it is visible in the
programmes that make up an actor’s range of public diplomacy practices. The focus
on scope, mechanism, and outcome is an initial move to reconstruct soft power to
account for the dimensions of its doxa — the sense-making and the shared
assumptions that underwrite how and why states choose to engage in communicative
action with foreign publics (Hopf 2010: 543).
A move to consider soft power as a practice draws upon a growing body of work
in IR and diplomacy studies, to provide a grounded understanding of how
communication, communication technologies, and the growth of polylateral relations
have constitutive impacts on the roles, structures and forms of governance embodied
in relations among international actors (Sending et al. 2011). Soft power is, arguably,
a contested concept, yet it also enjoys an increasingly global application as a
justification for public diplomacy. A focused attention to its translation into practice
is therefore justified.
This approach also sidesteps concerns among governments and academics about
public diplomacy that hinge upon demonstrating impact. Much of the ferment in the
study of public diplomacy is driven by questions about the measurement of effect.
Is there some correlation between a specific practice of persuasion or engagement
that yields attitude or behaviour change (Pamment 2012b; Hayden 2013b)? Or, how
does public diplomacy contribute to obtaining foreign policy objectives? These
questions are important, but they also elide how the practice of public diplomacy
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contains constitutive beliefs, encoded into practices like exchange programmes and
explicit in policy recommendations and strategic discourse, about relations among
states and publics, and how communication media are rendered available to states as
levers of influence. Following sociologist Merton’s (1957) distinction between
‘manifest’ and ‘latent’ functions, limiting the study of soft power to the questions of
policy actors would circumscribe what soft power signifies as a component of state-
reasoning about the world, potentially ignoring fundamental questions about the
intersection of communication and IR.
This approach draws on the insights in other comparative approaches to public
diplomacy studies. Rawnsley (2012), a leading public diplomacy scholar, makes the
case clear in his examination of Taiwan and China: ‘[P]recisely because governments
perceive the need to both exercise soft power and pronounce at every opportunity
their soft power credentials, it is important to analyse the concept’s cognitive use and
the discourse about it within particular social and cultural contexts’ (125). Before
reaching generalised claims about soft power, understanding soft power as a field of
actions, assumptions and approaches to integrating communication, technology and
statecraft would work to refine its conceptual utility, especially as practices of soft
power proliferate among an increasing range of international actors.
This article proposes a conceptual framework for soft power in the context of
public diplomacy, drawing on the ‘performative conceptual analysis’ deployed in
Guzzini’s studies of power, as well as other critical perspectives on soft power, to
better understand how the soft power concept has been adapted to fit particular
strategic requirements and contexts (Barnett and Duvall 2005; Bially Mattern 2005;
Zahran and Ramos 2010; Mor 2012). The aim is not to demonstrate soft power
effects under specific circumstances, nor to rehabilitate soft power as a kind of
normative theory. Rather, the concept is presented as suited to a more pragmatic
analysis, which illustrates the manner in which soft power is incorporated into
strategic positions that actors take on to manage international environments through
non-coercive practices. Soft power is considered as an assemblage of practical
reasoning that informs linkages between strategic arguments about communication
power and the subsequent practice of public diplomacy.
The focus on public diplomacy ties the notion directly to action, as opposed to
seeking soft power as somehow present within a particular resource, quality or
behaviour. The US public diplomacy scholar Gregory (2011) describes public
diplomacy as having evolved from ‘state-based instruments […] to engage and
persuade foreign publics’ to a broader mandate for international actors ‘to understand
cultures, attitudes and behavior; to build and manage relationships; and to influence
thoughts and mobilise actions to advance their interests and values’ (353). Gregory’s
definition suggests that public diplomacy as a practice manifests crucial assumptions
inherent in the soft power concept. Soft power represents a field of argument
positions made visible in public diplomacy actions and policy rhetoric about public
diplomacy.
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The article explores two bodies of soft power discourse evident in strategic
formulations about public diplomacy from the United States and China.
The proposed three-part comparative framework offers insight into the translation
of soft power within local contexts. The first aspect of the framework, scope, directs
attention to how the ‘subjects’ of soft power are recognised as viable in terms of
strategic objectives. Mechanism, the second aspect of the framework, reflects how
different power practices and resources (such as communication messages, culture,
and communication technologies) are envisioned as effective. Finally, outcomes
reveal how public diplomacy is justified and articulated as contributing to feasible
strategic objectives. The article builds on the work of practice-oriented scholarship
in IR and diplomatic studies, to propose a methodological framework based on
attention to registers of public argument indicative of institutional comprehension of
soft power as a field of practice (Navari 2011; Sending et al. 2011; Brown 2012;
Adler-Nissen 2013).
The proposed framework is not offered to replace the inferential studies on soft
power variables or the studies of ‘impact’, even though previous empirical analyses
of soft power resources, messaging tactics or audience dispositions have yet to
distil the soft power concept into generalisable claims about cause and effect
(Katzenstein and Keohane 2007; Atkinson 2010; Goldsmith and Horiuchi 2012).
What remains evident more readily, however, is that soft power is a concept with
strategic currency: an increasing number of states continue to act upon its existence
and deploy resources to cultivate or leverage its potential (Gallarotti 2011). This
article acknowledges the messiness of power as a more localised concept, and
proposes a constructivist methodology of understanding soft power via its meaning
in use (Guzzini 2005; Lukes 2005; Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009). Scope,
mechanism and outcome are offered to sort the supportive reasons and arguments
behind soft power. They focus attention on how states sustain particular positions
on the utility of communicative action, communication media, and their implicit
relation to the achievement of policy objectives. Scope, mechanism and outcome
are the constitutive elements that comprise soft power as a theory of state practice.
Following Rawnsley’s argument for comparative soft power study, these terms
refocus the study of soft power to the operative logics (and the context for these
logics) that inform how actors actively (re)define what soft power means through
public diplomacy.
Approaching soft power in the proposed manner directs attention to the strategic
and institutional consequences of states acting upon expectations of power beha-
viours and their relation to policy objectives. As Lukes (2005) argues, ‘how we
conceive of power makes a difference to how we think and act in general, and
especially in political contexts’ (478). Soft power matters, in this sense, not as a
generalisable theory, but because of its ‘effective performativity’ — illustrating how
actors adapt their diplomatic practice in ways that reflect soft power’s claims about
the international system and its constituent actors (Healy 2011).
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Nye argues that soft power is ‘not a theory’, but an ‘analytical concept’ (Nye 2011:
219; Rothman 2011). Recovering the working assumptions at stake in its implemen-
tation may establish grounds to develop contextually relevant measures of soft power
outcomes and effects. As Goldsmith and Horiuchi (2012) claim, the typology of
resources for soft power – culture, political values, and foreign policy legitimacy –
tend to be invariant structures, which makes it difficult to link soft power to particular
outcomes (558). The alternative question posed here is how states render something
like ‘culture’ as something available or necessary in relation to other international
actors, which would then open up the term soft power to more focused empirical
accounts. The contextual translation of soft power assumptions into specific practices
may also yield better studies of soft power that account for a diversity of cultural and
institutional biases that inflect its implementation through public diplomacy.
How states seek to leverage what Nye (2011) terms their ‘contextual intelligence’
about soft power offers insight about the integration of soft power, implicitly or
explicitly, into a broader calculus of strategic orientation and discourse (24). Put
another way, Nye’s own arguments hold up soft power as a practical adaptation to
conditions that warrant different practices to manage the international environment,
rather than a serious challenge to the established tenets of power in realist or liberal
visions of international politics. Soft power invites interrogation as a strategic
template or framework. Discourses of public diplomacy and strategic communication
offer an obvious site for comparative exploration.
The following section lays out the conceptual arguments that make up soft power
and public diplomacy, and builds a case for a comparative analysis of soft power in use
through the study of public diplomacy. Aspects of soft power practice in China and the
United States are presented to illustrate the diversity of interpretations that can be
drawn from a state acting upon soft power. The article concludes with a discussion of
the interdisciplinary contribution of a pragmatic, contingent perspective on soft power
through public diplomacy, in order to facilitate case-specific post hoc analysis that
illuminates the contested utility of soft power as an analytical perspective.

The soft power concept

The term soft power is invoked frequently in arguments for the practice of public
diplomacy, yet the two concepts are often conflated in ways that confuse their
definition (Hocking 2005: 28; Snow 2009; Fitzpatrick 2010). Public diplomacy implies
a set of diplomatic institutions and practices that enable nation-state governments to
communicate and establish relations with foreign publics (Cull 2009). These actions
involve a diverse range of activities, including exchange programmes, international
broadcasting, cultural diplomacy, and messaging campaigns. The practice of public
diplomacy is effectively warranted by the nature of international politics described in
the soft power concept, where influence and the ability to achieve policy objectives can
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be found in the capacity to cultivate relationships, convey reasoned arguments to

influential publics, and otherwise manage the symbolic context for international
relations in ways that yield desired strategic outcomes.
Nye (2011, 2004, 1991) describes soft power as a capacity to influence or attract
through non-aggressive or non-coercive means. Soft power is agent-focused in that it
is described as held or used by actors (nation-states, NGOs, and so on.), yet it is clear
that the term has descriptive implications for world politics that extend beyond actor
qualities. Soft power as a practical proposition opens up possibilities for leveraging
cultural and symbolic resources in international relations, hence its convenience for
justifying public diplomacy.
Soft power implies the capacity of states to rely upon structures like cultural
norms, social institutions and political values, to secure certain forms of compliance
or action as much as a provide a prescriptive value for states to do so (Lock 2010).
The core arguments of soft power also suggest that such structures can be leveraged
as tools of engagement. The expected utility of norms, institutions and values (that
states can act on and through them) means that they can be the focus of state action in
order to cultivate an anticipated soft-power capacity (Hayden 2011b; Gallarotti
2011). For example, the Chinese strategic turn towards the promotion of its cultural
heritage as a means to amplify its soft power repertoire illustrates a mandate for
action implied in China’s considerable attention to soft power in official discourse
(Wuthnow 2008; Li 2009). For China and others, soft power provides a ready set of
justifications for the international outreach and communication of public diplomacy
(Nye 2008).
Public diplomacy in its various forms amounts to communicative and social acts to
inform, persuade, and build relations between governments and strategic publics that
forward the foreign policy ambitions of the state engaging in public diplomacy.
Public diplomacy, as an institution of diplomatic practice, relies on a set of arguments
that establish its legitimacy as a field of practice relevant to the larger burdens of
statecraft (Hayden 2011b). Soft power, in particular, has served this purpose —
making the discourses of public diplomacy an ideal site to investigate the pragmatic
reasoning derived from the soft power concept.

Arguing soft power: towards a performative conceptual analysis

Arguments conflating the tenets of soft power with an increased necessity to engage
in public diplomacy suggest a conceptual use for soft power as something other than
an alternative route to persuasion among international actors. Rather, the salience of
soft power may say something more about a constitutive re-orientation for diplomatic
institutions grappling with an expanding sphere of stakeholders and a diminished
capacity for sovereignty (Sending et al. 2011; Hocking et al. 2012; Proedrou and
Frangonikolopoulos 2012). It implicates a sociological shift in the requirements of
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diplomatic actors and institutions: the salience of soft power among ministries of
foreign affairs should cue analysts to consider what happens when international
actors do things under expectations defined by the arguments about soft power.
Like other dominant strategic discourses of international relations, soft power is
an assemblage of claims about the nature of international politics that is played out
in fields of practice. So, how might practices like public diplomacy reveal
characteristics of the field? This form of insight is well-established in international
studies scholarship, but has yet to be applied to the notion of soft power and public
diplomacy (Neumann 2002; Adler-Nissen 2009; Adler and Pouliot 2011; Navari
2011). The methodological position that follows requires attention to strategic
and public argumentation about public diplomacy from policymakers and public
figures as well as the programmes derived from such discourse. The study of a
broadly construed sense of ‘argument’ has been readily acknowledged as pivotal in
constructivist depictions of inter-state socialisation and normative change
(Crawford 2002; Bjola and Kornprobst 2011). The methodological stance sug-
gested here is to situate argument as a performative component of strategic
discourse that deploys and defines concepts, where policy claims are not simply
indexical to rational calculations, but part of a broader repertoire of discursive
practice that warrants institutional orientation (Hanrieder 2011). Discourses about
soft power are constitutive in the sense that they inform the field of strategic
necessity for public diplomacy, and how resources, programmes and actions are
available as tools for soft power.
This form of analysis, however, does not suggest that the strategic language about
soft power is ultimately determinative, and that any ‘serious deliberative argument’ is
foreclosed (Checkel 2005: 819). Instead, analysis of policy discourse can locate the
generative capacity of policy argumentation to constitute the art of possibility
surrounding soft power, through how states load assumptions about communication,
media effects and linkages with other kinds of power into a rhetoric of necessity or
exigency (Hayden 2011b).
Guzzini’s (2005) ‘performative conceptual analysis’ of power illustrates the value of
focusing on the discursive acts that sustain the significance of soft power. Guzzini
observes that when a kind of ‘power’ is invoked in policy or embodied in practice, the
articulation carries the assumption that power is available to the actors involved – that
actors could have done otherwise. ‘Power implies an idea of counterfactuals – the act
of attributing power redefines the borders of what can be done’ (Guzzini 2005: 511).
Guzzini’s (2009) analysis of power is situated squarely within a constructivist
study of IR, and it largely rejects the search for a predictive ‘measure’ of power.
Rather, he proposes a more pragmatic analytical perspective to ascertain how
certain measures of power are agreed to as a social fact. For example, ‘diplomats
must first agree on what counts before they can start counting’ (Guzzini 2009: 10).
In this case, how is soft power transformed conceptually by how it is recognised by
practitioners and policymakers?
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Examining the discourses of soft power, with its concomitant reliance on culture,
values and political legitimacy, illustrates how these aspects are politicised.
To understand this, Guzzini looks to the terministic consequences of linking concepts:
Naming or addressing something in terms of power does something to it.
It establishes the borders of the political realm (res publica), where what falls
inside becomes an issue of public action and justification. By doing so, it appeals
to discourses of responsibility for acts taken and shunned. (Guzzini 2006: 3)
For example, when Chinese foreign policy discourse places a clear emphasis on
soft power, to improve national image through the promotion of particular cultural
resources, it renders these fields and resources normatively and practically part of
statecraft. A performative analysis of soft power would, therefore, attest to how
its discourses reveal ‘the respective value of different power resources’ (Guzzini
2006: 12). When discourse correlates with institutional realignments, such as China’s
growing research and investment in public diplomacy, the constitutive effects
become apparent.
Following Bourdieu’s approach to discourses that comprise a field, Guzzini
(2006) suggests attention to those discourses ‘where categories and schemes to
apprehend the social world interact with that world’ (11). As sociologist Alexander
(2005) argues in his approach to performance and power: ‘By identifying some-
thing as power […] we wish to indicate a dimension of social life in which coercion
can be evoked. Resources and capacities matter.’ (3) Neither Alexander nor
Guzzini are discounting the material dimension of power, but they are directing
attention to how actors draw conceptual lines around the resources and practices
that supposedly grant or reflect power — that is to say, how resources are
constructed discursively as pivotal to the broader signifier of power. In this sense,
power is evident in how it is argued for, elaborated, and ultimately acted upon in
policy and practice formations.
In his performative analysis of power, Guzzini draws parallels with securitisation
studies, where securitisation manifests itself as the process by which actions and
practices are rendered a shared-belief, or ‘securitised’ among international actors.
Securitisation scholarship attends to the consequences of discourses that construct
distinctions between self and other, but also to the range of actions, statements and
reactions that impact the ‘action-complexes’ of actors (Guzzini 2011: 336). The
routine ‘action-complexes’ of public diplomacy are not simply path-dependent
bureaucratic practices or programmes, but reflect an ongoing articulation of
intersubjective understanding among nation-states about communicating with
foreign publics. A performative understanding of soft power would look to those
key texts and practices to understand how the structures of soft power, embodied in
public diplomacy programmes, are reproduced. The goal of performative conceptual
analysis then is not a generalisable account of soft power, but attention to the claims
and conditions that warrant these arguments and render them authentic or credible.
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This form of analysis requires attention to the contingent nature of soft power as
a meaningful concept for policymakers, and a focus on the rhetorical and the
argumentative aspects of claims that link policy and practice (Goodnight 1998;
Epstein 2008: 9; Asen 2010). How policymakers make claims about power in ways
that establish necessity or highlight exigency forms the basis for the proposed
framework. When actors articulate, by virtue of confirmation or critique, the require-
ments of public diplomacy, they contribute to the pragmatics of justification that
sustain the prevailing logics about what is necessary or required about soft power.
The proposed framework differs from the study of practice conceived narrowly as
common-sensical positions held by state actors engaged in international relations.
Unreflective and iterative procedures often hold a priori significance for practice
theorists (Pouliot 2008). Yet, it is reasonable to suggest a continued analytical utility
of what Pouliot terms ‘the logic of representation’ within a pragmatic consideration
of policy rhetoric (ibid.: 260). Policy argumentation can reveal pivotal articulations
of institutional purpose (Goodnight 1998, 2010). Meaning, we can look to certain
forms of representational evidence that questions the stability of the existing
discourses and practice in times of strategic uncertainty, such as the examples
discussed below that argue for the inclusion of soft power capacities to address
perceived institutional inadequacies. What Adler and Pouliot (2011) describe as the
‘fixation of meaning’ is as much a reflection of practice sedimentation into foreign
policy institutions over time as it is a product of sense-making during episodes of
institutional uncertainty (3).

Scope, mechanism, and outcome

Articulated justification, or, the rhetoric behind soft power, is important because
neither public diplomacy nor soft power are wholly uncontroversial aspects of
statecraft. How these concepts are argued for and evaluated through what social
theorist Boltanski (2011) has termed ‘meta-pragmatic’ registers of institutional
discourse suggests their contingent significance: they are seen as necessary to what
institutions of statecraft require to mitigate uncertainty and interpret strategic
imperatives (72). Reflexive argumentation within institutional contexts also provides
an instructive resource for comparative investigation of soft power as it has been
translated into an operative theory of practice. Scope, mechanism, and outcome
provide insight on the translation of discourse into practice.

Scope
Scope is drawn from Nye’s (2011) own description of soft power – and signifies who
or what is actually involved in any case of soft power action (6). Scope refers to the
subjects of soft power: which actors are seeking power, who is the intended
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‘audience’ for soft power action, and what types of actors are implicated otherwise in
an emblematic case of soft power. Actors who seek to employ soft power do so under
assumptions of their own capacity to use power. When a nation-state decides to
engage a foreign public, it does so under assumptions about what a nation-state can
or should do in terms of its identity as a sovereign state.
Scope refers to the way in which programmes of public diplomacy reflect a
rationalisation of the audience — the way in which public diplomacy organisations
‘imagine’ publics as available to persuasion, comprehend audiences as pertinent to
foreign policy objectives, and credit the subjects of soft power as important enough
to merit a public, rather than a traditional form of diplomacy (Napoli 2010). Scope is
also a critical point of analysis, because how states see publics as publics has
consequences for the asymmetry of power between the sender and the receiver. For
example, when states conduct public diplomacy that emphasises collaboration or
dialogue, audiences gain some benefits of information transparency when they are
rendered stakeholders in a diplomatic scenario. However, if publics are conceived as
informational ‘dupes’, public diplomacy programmes will reflect minimal expecta-
tions of an audiences’ interpretive agency.
These differing conceptions of audience are evident in the public diplomacy
strategies of China and the United States. For example, Chinese soft power
strategy seeks to break a perceived Western monopoly over China’s image in
global media through predominance in international broadcasting. Zhao (2004), a
veteran of Chinese international communication efforts and public diplomacy
scholar, explains the imperatives that drive China’s focus on global media and
representation: ‘[M]ore than 80 per cent of international news is now supplied by
news agencies of advanced countries. It is indispensable for China to explain
itself to counter the image shaped by these media of advanced countries’ (3).
In this regard, public diplomacy is predicated on a media-dependent audience
susceptible to media effects.
Scope describes both the qualities of the auditors for public diplomacy as much as
the range of ideal stakeholders. Chinese public diplomacy discourse, in particular,
implicates domestic audiences in strategic arguments as necessary to the success
of any soft power cultivation (Wang 2012). For example, foreign minister Yang’s
arguments suggest that foreign engagement is predicated on the domestic public’s role:
[P]ublic diplomacy should look both inward and outward. Overall planning is
crucial so that our public diplomacy always serves […] domestic reform,
development and stability and international peace, development and cooperation.
We need to show the world a true picture of China and at the same time, offer the
domestic public more comprehensive information on the international situation
and China’s diplomacy. (Yang 2011)
Analyses of China’s orientation to scope suggest both a fixation on the promotion of
image to a range of foreign publics dominated by Western media hegemony, as well
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as a more inclusive approach to how the state should respond (Tan 2012). Public
diplomacy is not a fringe element of a broader diplomatic apparatus, but necessarily
involves the cooperation and contribution of domestic publics as part of a ‘huge
systematic project’ across state institutions and citizens (Yang 2011).
In contrast, the United States has engaged more recently in multiple efforts to
facilitate audiences’ communication, rather than to control the field of communica-
tion. These audiences are rendered in policy discourse as politically viable and
technologically enabled networks. Ross (2011), former Senior Advisor for Innova-
tion to the US Secretary of State, declares that ‘networks are the defining feature of
the new global power structure. The very clear evidence of recent years demonstrates
that network technologies devolve power away from the nation-state and large
institutions’ (452). As a result, the US strategic engagement programmes are
designed increasingly around the technological contexts through which these
relations are sustained and which maintain their legitimacy.
While China seeks to compete in the broader context of news flows to audiences
awaiting information, the United States is oriented towards being ‘present’ in
communication spaces where audiences already act and consume information
(McHall 2013). As McHale, former US Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy
and Public Affairs, argues:
In a world where power and influence truly belongs to the many, we must engage
with more people in more places. That is the essential truth of public diplomacy in
the internet age […]. The pyramid of power flipped because people all around the
world are clamoring to be heard, and demanding to shape their own futures. They
are having important conversations right now – in chatrooms and classrooms and
boardrooms – and they aren’t waiting for us. (McHale 2011)
The imagined public telegraphed in the US public diplomacy reflects a politically
engaged public sphere defined by deliberative action as much as a site of strategic
exigency (Comor and Bean 2012). It is not so much that the US public diplomacy
seeks to persuade in all cases of engagement, as it is that it wishes to demonstrate that
the United States adheres to an ethic of communication between the stakeholders
involved. A US public diplomacy characterised by enabling or facilitating commu-
nication serves the symbolic purpose of establishing credibility. Facilitation engen-
ders a long-term route to the cultivation of influence among foreign publics that veers
close to the conceptual domain of development practice. Former Undersecretary of
State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Sonenshine makes the strategic
argument for the value of this vision of public diplomacy:

Public diplomacy does bring benefits to the American people. It does that by
building positive environments with people everywhere – face-to-face, through
educational and cultural exchanges, and through social media. When we help more
people become healthy, productive, democratic, empowered, and prosperous,
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they become our economic, trade, social, political, and strategic partners. That
spells security and prosperity for America (Sonenshine 2012; emphasis added)

The scope dimension of American public diplomacy hinges on the provision of

services and the modes of outreach — not necessarily the content of messages or
image management.
Chinese public diplomacy programmes — including an incredibly extensive
investment in international broadcasting — also see foreign audiences as
strategically necessary to China’s global politics (Yu 2010). Yet, it is not entirely
obvious whether or not Chinese public diplomacy programmes convey that its
audiences are publics in the sense implied by other nation-state public diplomacy
strategies. And this has consequences for how China pursues a soft power-based
strategy of public diplomacy and global image management. Consider the
language of China’s 2006 Five-Year Plan for Cultural Development, which
involves a ‘go global’ strategy of cultural promotion. The plan’s soft power
approach is based on attraction sustained by a capacity to reach audiences through
‘strong propaganda methods and strong propaganda capabilities […] to form
public opinion powers commensurate with China’s international status’ (Glaser
and Murphy 2009: 15). Foreign audiences are thus construed as vulnerable to the
‘prejudiced’ views of non-Chinese media (Qingguo 2010). The scope of soft
power in this logic operates on a rendering of the mass audience as the likely
subjects to public diplomacy initiatives.
The ‘translation’ of soft power into a particular discourse of public diplomacy is
thus conditioned by how it constitutes the subject of soft power. How are the targets
interpellated or ‘made into subjects’ by virtue of the act of engagement tactics like
public diplomacy (Althusser 1971)? What policymakers mean by ‘publics’ can have
significant implications for what soft power can accomplish, let alone what it actually
signifies as a kind of power. Recent critiques of state-based practices of public
diplomacy, for example, argue for a networked public diplomacy (Lock 2010).
Publics are ‘networks’ in that they are structures of relations around issues, cultural
practices, ethnicity, interests, and so on. — structures that can be leveraged,
persuaded, or otherwise engaged by virtue of their structural properties.
The fact that networks, as a social form, are increasingly significant to public
diplomacy is not new (Kelley 2010; Melissen 2011). What is new, however, is the
manner in which soft power can be derived from networks based on on how a public
diplomacy programme’s design anticipates network effects (Fisher 2010). Analysts
of soft power might reconsider soft power resources and behaviours as properties of
networks and the ability to encode such networks. Analysts can also gauge the
prospects of soft power by how scope reflects the way networks (as publics,
audiences,and so on.) are perceived by states as available to be leveraged in their
attempts to use public diplomacy for strategic purposes. As public diplomacy
researcher Yepsen (2012) argues, how networks are seen as constellations of viable
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political actors that sustain a particular kind of political discourse can have crucial
implications for the success of public diplomacy interventions.

Mechanism
The concept of mechanism accounts for the ways in which governments connect
resources to behaviours in acts of public diplomacy. The use of the term is not to be
confused with ‘causal mechanisms’ as understood within process-tracing methodol-
ogy, but as a signifier of how states mobilise or arrange specific resources to achieve
expected effects (Curtis and Koivisto 2010; Collier 2011). Most likely, any soft power
case study of public diplomacy makes a de facto claim about a ratio of resources to
behaviours. Mechanism reflects how nation-states anticipate ‘what works’, which can
be ascertained both in strategic discourse, programme evaluation, and in retrospective
reconstruction of public diplomacy episodes. And the manner in which a mechanism is
perceived as attributable to a strategic outcome can have significant impact on how
public diplomacy is ultimately rationalised as a tool of statecraft. As public diplomacy
scholar Pamment (2012b) argues, the way public diplomacy is saddled with measure-
ment and evaluation imperatives can delimit the available repertoire of public
diplomacy programming around culture, information, and relation-building.
‘Mechanism’ is useful as an analytical category because of the variety of methods
employed in public diplomacy. States rely on different programmes, media,
messages, and forms of reputational ‘capital’ in order to pursue the cultivation of
soft power through public diplomacy. For example, China anticipates the persuasive
draw of its considerable cultural heritage — which is viewed as linked to achieving
particular objectives. A 2006 editorial for the People’s Daily frames the strategic
significance in plain terms: ‘culture is a key integral part of a country’s overall
national strength, what people have called “soft power”, and it has become a point of
competition between national powers’ (Bandurski 2007). China’s Confucius Institute
partnerships with education institutions around of the world are a clear indication of
this position, though the ‘power’ of culture is also evident in a significant amount of
policy discourse on soft power within the Chinese academy and in speeches by
policymakers (Ding 2008; Li 2008).
Former Chinese president Hu Jintao’s position on soft power in relation to culture
elaborates an implicit mechanism in a speech to the 17th CPC Congress in October,
2007, in which he argued that China should ‘enhance the country’s cultural soft
power [wenhua ruanshili]’ (Glaser and Murphy 2009: 16). For Hu, ‘culture has
increasingly become an important source of national cohesion and creativity and an
important factor in the competition of overall national strength’ (Glaser and Murphy
2009: 16). This position translates into a concerted effort to promote cultural
products and perspective into the perceived competitive field of cultural circulation.
Chinese information minister Li Changchun, speaking in 2008 on the occasion of
the 50th anniversary of the creation of China Central Television (CCTV), articulates
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a strategic argument for the mechanisms by which soft power tools translate into
foreign policy outcomes:
In the modern age, whichever nation’s communication methods are most
advanced, whichever nation’s communication capacity is strongest, it is that
nation whose culture and core values are able to spread far and wide, and that
nation that has the most power to influence the world. Enhancing our commu-
nication capacity domestically and internationally is of direct consequence to our
nation’s international influence and international position, of direct consequence
to the raising of our nation’s cultural soft power […]. (Quoted in Bandurski 2009)
In other words, how states perceive culture or communication instrumentally as
persuasive implicates the kind of power anticipated, because it ultimately impacts the
programmes that derive from these assumptions. Analysis of soft power mechanisms
is not simply one of description, but also of inferring constitutive effects on policy
and programmatic choices.
In the case of China, the expected returns of communication and diplomatic
framing language are illustrative of the role assigned to language as a key mechanism
of its soft power. As Callahan (2007) argues, there is ample evidence of Chinese efforts
at the iterative and repetitive use of foreign-policy ‘language games’ to cultivate
influence and assuage concerns over China’s rise (786–87). Put simply, the practice of
terminological adjustment says much about the expected returns of rhetorical fine-
tuning in diplomatic messaging over other forms of inducement.
Another implication of mechanism involves the expected capacity of media forms
to elicit effects. In this sense, public diplomacy derives inevitably from an
institutional construction of meaning around media and communication technology:
what kind of impact media can have, what sort of social significance the platforms
exhibit, and what sorts of scale of reach is possible. Again, the contrast between the
United States and China is instructive.
The Chinese emphasis on international broadcasting tools reflects a pre-occupation
with ‘monological’, transmission-oriented communication (Cowan and Arsenault
2008). The Chinese case also suggests that attitudes towards the efficacy of political
communication platforms are refracted through their historical domestic context,
which conditions how they are deployed in anticipation of an effect. As a result, the
Chinese have invested a considerable amount of resources into their international
broadcasting portfolio and have moved to manage internet infrastructure aggres-
sively at the domestic and the international levels (Kalathil 2011; Price 2011;
MacKinnon 2012). While this attitude is changing to acknowledge the limitations of
broadcast models that target undifferentiated audiences, the emphasis on crafting a
better message delivery strategy prevails (Tan 2012).
Similar critiques of strategic communication attitudes were levied at the United
States after the launch of Al-Hurra satellite news channel for Arab publics in 2004 —
where transmission-oriented technologies failed to achieve public diplomacy
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objectives in the context of changing social roles for such technologies among Arab
audiences for the US public diplomacy (Cull 2008; Kraidy 2009). The wash of
criticism within the US government and among academic commentators pointed to
the misuse of communication tools and the social relations they sustain. A 2009 US
Government Accountability Office report highlighted that ‘a failure to adapt in this
dynamic communications environment could significantly raise the risk that U.S.
public diplomacy efforts could become increasingly irrelevant’ (GAO 2009). In the
wake of such critiques, the United States has sought to leverage the capacity of social
media platforms in order to establish credibility (if not necessarily legitimacy) among
sceptical publics (Comor and Bean 2012; Hayden, 2013a).
What these kinds of practices reveal are institutional accommodations. The so-
called ‘21st Century Statecraft’ policies launched during the Clinton tenure as the US
Secretary of State underscore the facilitative turn in the US public diplomacy, and rest
on the assumption that power is distributed, non-hierarchical, and increasingly outside
the realm of the state. Ross (2011) claims that the ‘proliferation of communication and
information technologies creates significant changes for statecraft’ (452). Ross argues
that the nature of diplomacy itself must change to adapt to the disruptive potential of
social media technologies and the networked politics that they enable.

Outcome
Outcome reflects the range of objectives anticipated from the effective use or
cultivation of soft power. This is not a novel concept: it is clearly present in scholarly
treatments of power (Berenskoetter 2007). The outcome in this case, however,
focuses attention on the goals that are argued to follow from scope and mechanism
when a state engages in acts of public diplomacy. This is particularly important,
because public diplomacy is often criticised for being disconnected from strategic
imperatives (Wallin 2012).
The outcome is a relatively straightforward category, but it also addresses some of
the unwieldiness in Nye’s use of the term ‘behaviour’. Behaviour, for example,
seems relatively limited in its range of application and in the kind of explanatory
narratives that could arise from the post-hoc process-tracing that Nye (2011)
encourages (95). What form of ‘getting what you want’ is accomplished through
agenda-setting or attraction in ways that account for the concatenation of resources,
programmes, and actors that culminate in the management of the international
environment? The analytical focus on arguments about soft power outcomes offers
insight into how ‘behaviours’ become invested with strategic efficacy.
Other scholars have suggested similar broad categories. Wolfers (1962), for
example, identified milieu vs possession goals for international politics. Wolfers
argued that possession goals reflect direct impacts that relate to the needs or
requirements of the actor in question (e.g., acquiring access to a resource, preserving
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territory, and so on.). Milieu goals, in contrast, are about preserving or transforming
the context in which the state must act.
Similar attention to the systemic affordances of power is present in Riker’s (1986)
concept of ‘heresthetics’, which describes how a state actor would strive to set the
‘rules of the game’ in its favour. Viewed in this way, the anticipated outcomes of
public diplomacy can be seen as a process of framing or socialisation, where acts of
soft power cultivate appreciation of values and institutions (Ikenberry 2006).
Likewise, the crux of Van Ham’s (2010) ‘social power’ thesis is control over the
intersubjective perception of norms, values, and rules that support relations among
nation-states. Social power, considered as a kind of outcome, revolves around the
capacity to control what it means to be a state, and the kind of political agency that
derives from that identity. However, unlike some of the previous scholars mentioned,
the articulated ‘outcomes’ are not offered as a measure of rationality, but as an
indicator of a contingent rational calculus. As Pouliot (2008) argues, ‘a practice can
be oriented toward a goal without being consciously informed by it’ (261).
There is evidence that China seeks a form of social power, not only in its public
diplomacy, but across other forms of international engagement through bilateral
agreements and developmental investment (Brautigam, 2009). China’s foreign policy
— including the promotion of its development model, its defence of resource flows,
and its own internal politics of domestic political control – reflects a larger agenda of
shaping international norms of sovereignty and ‘harmony’ (Li 2009: 30). As Chinese
scholar Xan Yutong argues about the necessity of Chinese soft power, ‘[d]uring a
period of globalization, the sphere of competition is no longer about land, resources,
or markets but rule-making, setting regulations, norms, or customs’ (quoted in
D’Hooge 2010: 4). The over-arching burden of public diplomacy as a strategic
orientation towards outcomes is to help shape the context for China’s message – to
frame its actions and its rising power as acceptable, legitimate, and unthreatening.
Put another way, the long-term agenda of Chinese soft power may very well be to
diminish the predominance of Western cultural and social norms that inform world
politics, and to engineer the ‘field’ of policy practice to its favour, such as with the
‘democratisation of international relations’ position introduced by Zhang Zemin,
which provided a Chinese interpretation of multilateralism to address critiques of its
own actions. To accomplish this kind of systemic goal, Chinese public diplomacy has
been constructed as an intervention into China’s ‘international publicity’ and national
image, to combat the perceived media and communication hegemony of the West
(Yu 2010; Charhar Symposium 2013). This position rests on the possibility that the
normative structure of international relations is available to enterprising actors to be
actively contested with a comprehensive public diplomacy.
The United States, in contrast, struggles with an apparent loss of soft power in the
form of legitimacy and credibility. The problem, as former CIA analyst Pillar (2011)
notes, is that the US soft power objectives are assumed to stem from resources that do
not require significant maintenance or amplification. Soft power is presumed to be in
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Scope, mechanism, and outcome: arguing soft power in the context of public diplomacy
347

abundance: the US democratic ideals and values do not need to be explained because
they are by nature universal. Under this logic, the US soft power resources only need
to be conveyed, not elaborated, argued, or even reconsidered. The undercurrent of
American exceptionalism that pervades the US thinking (or lack thereof) on soft
power has been a persistent factor in policy deliberations on public diplomacy in the
United States for decades (Parry-Giles 1994; Hayden 2011a). Lack of attention to the
necessity of engagement has resulted in a relatively poor integration of public
diplomacy into the larger calculus of foreign and security policy (Wallin 2012).
More contemporary developments in the US public diplomacy practice, however,
suggest a gradual shift in strategic thinking on soft power outcomes. As mentioned
previously, the US public diplomacy engagement has moved towards a facilitative
stance — the provision of communication capacity and the empowerment of foreign
publics for development (Gregory 2011). This is evident in programmes such as the
‘TechCamp’ development events designed to bring together technologists with civil
society actors to solve problems in developing countries, as well as in the attempts to
leverage Twitter, YouTube and Facebook in order to convene ‘real-time’ engage-
ment with crucial publics (Seib 2012). Similarly, the US international broadcasting
actors are leveraging online platforms to provide means to communicate within
countries and regions beset by authoritarian communication policies (Powers and
Youmans 2012).
The anticipated outcome of the US soft power can be understood as a kind of
milieu goal, to cultivate both a communication governance regime that benefits free
information flows as well as a particular ethic of communication represented by the
United States (McCarthy 2011). For example, the US ‘Freedom to Connect’ policy
agenda reflects a strategic priority to support a global communication infrastructure
that remains free of authoritarian information controls. While some have argued that,
ultimately, this reinforces the US economic interests in international communication
governance, the Freedom to Connect policy, along with targeted investments in
technological development projects functions as a symbolic public diplomacy.
A senior technological advisor at the US State Department claimed: ‘Our basic
assumption is that we’ve lost control of the information environment – the only
option is to embrace the change and work to shape it.’ (Hanson 2012) Rather than
engage in a Cold War-style ‘information battle’, policy emphasis has shifted to
shaping the bias of global communication flows in ways that benefit other US
strategic priorities (Zaharna 2009).
This has led critical scholars to question the intent of ‘engagement’ as a strategy
for public diplomacy, because it represents an intervention into the way foreign
publics communicate among themselves. The audiences to public diplomacy,
regardless of their strategic importance, already use social media platforms to sustain
communal ties, identity and cultural sovereignty. What does it signify when the
United States seeks to leverage these affordances in ways that simply reflect state
interest (Comor and Bean 2012)? In this case, the outcome for policies and
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programmes that facilitate the means to communicate is conveyed symbolically in

the intent to manage the ways in which ideas circulate among publics.
How the United States demonstrates its credibility and intent through such
programmes anticipates the increasingly multistakeholder, multilateral governance
that dominates global policy concerns. The soft power of the United States manifests
itself in the ability to provide collaborative solutions to governance problems that cut
across levels of actorhood: individuals, transnational advocacy networks and, of
course, states. It is a public diplomacy of demonstration, rather than persuasion. The
US public diplomacy appears moving towards an invitational stance on international
rhetoric (Foss and Griffin 1995).
Understanding the strategic conceptualisation of soft power outcomes in the
context of the US public diplomacy is perhaps best understood as a fusion of
the aforementioned ‘21st Century Statecraft’ programmes of facilitation with the
available affordances of social media technologies for communication goals. In other
words, the realm of conceivable ends linked to soft power for public diplomacy has
changed. Former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
Glassman’s (2008) speech on ‘public diplomacy 2.0’ signalled this shift in the
strategic culture of the US public diplomacy. Its key message was to reframe the
locus of expected power within communication, from ‘diction’ to ‘conversation’
(Glassman 2008). Glassman argues that rather than burnish the image of the United
States, the United States should seek to use communication tools actively to
transform contexts of strategic importance to its foreign policy.
This argument effectively expands the domain of public diplomacy into the more
traditional sphere of responsibility dominated by diplomacy and the national security
apparatus. It suggests that securing the communication ‘contexts’ (such as publics at
risk of religious radicalisation), yields a kind of soft power. Glassman argues to
revise the core justifications for public diplomacy rather than articulate a need for
different tools — by implicating communication resources as pivotal to fields of
diplomatic practice traditionally outside public diplomacy. These kinds of arguments
continue to animate the digital diplomacy increasingly apparent across the US State
Department activities, and evident in doctrinal statements that fuse the purpose of
diplomacy with public diplomacy (Hanson 2012).

Conclusion: Looking ahead

As Melissen argued in 2005, there are real limits to our understanding of soft power if
we narrow our focus to the experience of the US public diplomacy. Melissen
provided a clear invitation for a more robust agenda for comparative diplomatic
research. This article offers one potential contribution that moves beyond much of
the extant normative and prescriptive literature, and offers a comparative, cross-
national framework for analysis.
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Scope, mechanism, and outcome: arguing soft power in the context of public diplomacy
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This article proposes a framework for a pragmatic analysis of soft power in the
context of public diplomacy that builds on a growing body of scholarly attention to
public diplomacy and strategic communication in international studies, and
encourages attention to the institutional dimensions of public diplomacy as a tool
of statecraft. The way states act upon assumptions that inhere in public diplomacy
practice can provide insight into larger debates about soft power within the
interdisciplinary field of public diplomacy studies. Comparative research, in
particular, can offer insights that demonstrate the utility of soft power as a theory
of practice as much as a theory of influence in international affairs (Pamment
2012a; Sun 2012). This study uses public diplomacy to inform a grounded
understanding of soft power, although, clearly, public diplomacy can also
demonstrate competing normative frameworks for statecraft, such as tensions
between ‘mutual understanding’ and ‘persuasion’ that inhere within institutional
debates about public diplomacy reform (Zaharna et al. 2013).
As critics have noted, ultimately, the soft power concept may be too under-
specified to be of use for analysts seeking to understand the instruments,
vulnerabilities and strategies that define the contemporary practice of power,
especially those that seek prediction-oriented, deductive-nomothetic theories
(Layne 2010; Goldsmith and Horiuchi 2012). However, if soft power is most
visible in the ‘conversion’ process, as Nye argues, then it may be best under-
stood as a way to assign meaning post hoc to an exercise of power — to guide
the assemblage of factors that concatenate into particular objectives or effects.
Soft power, as a concept in practice, may also reflect a wider array of symbolic
action that can threaten or coerce as much as attract or cultivate identification
(Bially Mattern 2005). The study of soft power, as suggested here, invites
analysis of how the tools of soft power are situated within larger strategic
discourses that describe their efficacy, their subjects and their purpose in a
calculus of interest.
From a diagnostic perspective, the soft power concept can help analysts ascertain
where certain resources and behaviours factor into particular situations or episodes,
such as in Atkinson’s (2010) analysis of military exchange programmes and their
correlational effects on domestic human rights policies. This is clearly Nye’s
suggestion for how the concept can be put to use. Yet, as argued here and elsewhere,
soft power’s abstract terms are often too underspecified and too context dependent to
generate prescriptive insights, other than to highlight increased attention to the ways
in which states can intervene into the domestic formation of foreign polices
(Goldsmith and Horiuchi 2012).
Soft power’s conceptual ambiguity is an invitation for the concept to be
appropriated and resituated in localised discourses of international strategy.
The ‘performative conceptual analysis’ offered by Guzzini and promoted here
provides an opening to study the reflexive argumentation within a comparative
investigation of soft power. The framework of scope, mechanism, and outcome as
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aspects of soft power discourse conveys the underspecified elements that

comprise the soft power concept’s assumptions, and works to unpack its
component dimensions of publics, communication modalities, and the logics of
how states can acquire influence.
Future performative analysis can (and should) involve more comprehensive
and ethnographic investigations that explore the cultural, historical and organisa-
tional factors in the strategic currency of soft power in a given context.
One comparative strategy following this lead could explore the manner in
which identity, nationalism and cultural politics influence inevitably the way
‘culture’ is rendered in public diplomacy programmes and supportive statements
based on soft power. The politics of culture at stake among emergent nation-
branding strategies could be a productive site of enquiry to demonstrate the
key differences in how the abstract terms of soft power are recontextualised
(Kaneva 2011).
Another strategy could be to assess the array of strategic objectives that stem from
the broad warrant of soft power, and how these ‘outcomes’ are linked to particular
geostrategic circumstances and perceived exigency. For example, the ‘art of the
possible’ to be achieved in the soft power of ‘middle powers’ is something quite
different from the systemic ambitions of China or the United States (Bátora 2006;
Gilboa 2009). Providing more granular attention to the kind of effects policymakers
attribute to soft power could enrich its potential as an explanatory narrative for
international relations, or make room for cognate concepts that reflect more readily
the capacities of non-super power states to effect change, such as in Slaughter’s
(2011) notion of ‘collaborative power’.
Further study is necessary because, despite its limited impact as a theo-
retical concept, soft power appears to animate implicitly and explicitly the
growth of public diplomacy and strategic communication programmes around
the world. Soft power reflects an emergent set of assumptions about international
influence enacted in the resources and modalities of communication. Soft power
as a general proposition may also beg for conceptual revision, to clarify what
kinds of resources and behaviours reflect the translation of power capacities into
outcomes, as well as help constitute a rhetoric of international engagement. As
Leander (2011) argues, theorising about concepts in IR should not strive to
produce ‘cookbooks’, but rather reflect the burden of writing ‘unfinished
dictionaries’ comprised of terms and concepts that must inevitably be revised.
Following Guzzini’s (2013) suggestion for a more robust interrogation of the
concepts that underwrite theorising about IR, scholarship must engage the
‘historical anchorage’ of concepts like soft power continuously, to acknowledge
how such terms are informed and constructed from the practices they otherwise
justify (536).
What remains amidst the analytical problems, however, is that nation-states still
act on some kind of soft power assumption, while the institutions of public
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351

diplomacy continue to expand as a kind of diplomatic practice. For example, in 2010,

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying explained the necessity of public diplomacy
for China:
Having public diplomacy is like playing a football match. Playing a game is good
even when you don’t care about winning or losing. One gets the chance to present
his side and allow others to feel his existence. But one will definitely lose if he
doesn’t play at all. (Global Times 2010)
Fu Ming was commenting at the opening of China’s first centre for public
diplomacy research at the Beijing Foreign Studies University (People’s Daily
Online 2010).
Future research can also investigate the less obvious, but more far-reaching
implications of soft power perspectives that manifest themselves in institutional
transformation and the practices that develop from these adaptations. The US
Secretary of State Clinton (2010) signalled this in a public defence of the first US
State Department Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review in 2010:
‘[T]he department is broadening the way it conceives of diplomacy as well as the
roles and responsibilities of its practitioners […]; increasing global interconnect-
edness now necessitates reaching beyond governments to citizens directly’
(emphasis added). Soft power matters, not as a constant of international politics,
but as a set of constitutive claims that manifest themselves in institutional
transformation.
Likewise, less dynamic resources like culture, values and foreign policy
legitimacy may be crucial to the conceptual schema of soft power, but how they
become resources available to states is increasingly important to the practice
of public diplomacy and strategic communication. As Zhao Qizheng justifies
public diplomacy, ‘China cannot always be the gentleman who works more but
talks less in the present world flooded with information. China must, instead,
strive for “national rhetorical competence” in the form of a robust public
diplomacy’ (People’s Daily Online 2011). These kinds of arguments warrant
attention to how states reorient, confirm and critique their institutional approaches
to network relations, international structures and the changing nature of political
agency beneath the level of the nation-state that mandate a kind of communication
power.
The preponderance of new social media technologies, hyper-transparency and
adaptations to these conditions through new public diplomacy programmes
compel a revision of soft power thinking. The proposed vehicles for analysis —
scope, mechanism and outcome — ground such understanding in a phenomenol-
ogy of soft power. These constructs are suited for an increasingly necessary
critical and pragmatic diagnosis, more than prediction and causal generalities, and
they offer another way to test the limits and capacities of soft power as a framework
for statecraft.
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About the author

Craig Hayden is Assistant Professor in the School of International Service at the
American University and Director of the AU Public and Cultural Diplomacy Forum.
His research focuses on the policy discourse of public diplomacy, the rhetoric of
foreign policy related to media technologies, and the role of media representation in
international relations. He launched the International Studies Association Working
Group on Public Diplomacy and is a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public
Diplomacy. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in
Global Contexts (Lexington Books, 2011). He also blogs at www.intermap.org.
He holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the USC Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism, and an M.A. in International Relations from the
USC School of International Relations.