Soft power at war: strategies of Russia and Ukraine

Joseph Nye (1990b) has coined the terms soft power and hard power to explain the power changes in contemporary international politics. What has already been observed by many scholars is how the soft power strategy employed by governments to mobilize the resources of soft power to communicate with and attract the public of other countries can benefit states’ economies by marketizing cultural resources. However, since soft power strategy is context-dependent and goal-oriented, once it is employed in a security and political context, it will differ from its economic purposes. Congruently, there are debates around the concept of soft power regarding its efficiency and its interaction with hard power (i.e., use of coercion military power), where the latter concept is still predominant in IR. Therefore, this research asks how states employ soft power in politically sensitive contexts such as wartime. The case study conducted is the prior and during the first-year duration of the Russo - Ukrainian War in 2022, analyzing Russia’s and Ukraine’s soft power strategies including nation branding, cultural diplomacy, and public diplomacy. Two soft power strategic directions emerge: creating a targeted sphere of influence to facilitate state actors’ movement in wartime and garnering international support for collective actions for the benefits in war. The mechanism is rooted in soft power’s ability to influence individuals’ and states’ actions, which indeed entails the importance of soft power in contemporary international politics.