Description
Research on soft power and public diplomacy as one of its instruments has primarily focused on Western states (Cull, 2010; Nye, 2004). Others have associated soft power with Western and democratic states (Walker, 2016) The popularity that the concept gained has attracted researchers to think of ways to measure and analyse states’ practices (Darnton, 2020; Yarchi et al 2017; Laifer and Kitchen, N., 2017). Yet, during the last decade there is an emergent stream of critical scholarship on soft power: Melissa Nisbett and J. Simon Rofe (2022), argue that soft power polls are bias towards the West and the concept is Western by its nature despite being appropriated by authoritarian regimes, while Daya Thussu (2014) highlights the need to “de-Americanize” soft power to engage other states in the discourse; and Maria Repnikova (2022), questioning the very relevance of soft power in a non-Western context. Drawing on these developments, this paper argues that public diplomacy and soft power have been conceptualized in Western contexts and implemented by Western states; thus, they rely mainly on and reproduce the asymmetry between Western major powers and others. Furthermore, I advance the argument of a postcolonial approach needed to study non-Western powers’ understanding and engagement in public diplomacy. I will apply postcolonial theory and engage with IR scholarship addressing postcolonial questions to explore the impact of Western hegemony on public diplomacy and soft power in the context of the Middle East, an understudied region.
