Description
This paper presents a new multi-theoretical lens combining poststructuralism, constructivism, and postcolonial theory to rethink soft power in postcolonial contexts, with an empirical focus on Lebanon. Existing mainstream literature on soft power often neglects how power is experienced/contested in societies shaped by complex colonial and neo-imperial legacies. The paper addresses this shortcoming by situating Lebanon - a site of overlapping colonial histories and geopolitical contestation - as a central case to explore how soft power operates through localised narratives of identity and resistance that disrupts Western hegemonic discourse. This novel intervention brings together poststructuralism's attention to discourse and power/knowledge relations with constructivist emphasis on identity, while grounding analysis in the postcolonial understandings of inherited power asymmetries. This approach reveals the nuanced ways in which power is both appropriated and resisted in Lebanon, exposing the limitations of dominant theory that overlooks such subaltern agency. This contribution advances postcolonial IR by demonstrating how empirical engagement with Lebanon’s colonial and postcolonial realities deepens understandings of power’s contested meanings beyond dominant epistemologies. In doing so, it offers an alternative epistemology vital to the ongoing decolonisation of international studies, enriching the Global IR agenda with more context-sensitive analyses of power dynamics in the Global South.
