Third Team Presentation
Team 3 presents on their choice of topic to the Campaign 640 space.
2.8 MSN Chat on Concepts in Unit 2
Instructor facilitates optional MSN chat on concepts from unit 2. Unit Two Notes: Week Three
Keywords for week three:
. hard power and soft power
. the fungibility of power
. the paradox of plenty
. structural violence
. integration and agitation propaganda
. technique
. Orientalism
. power/knowledge
1. Context and Perspective: what is “soft power”?
From Joseph Nye. “Soft Power.” Power in the Global Information Age: From Realism to
Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2004. This article, originally published in 1990, is
featured in the same collection from which the AC640 reading by Nye is taken. This earlier
article is concerned to define and explain the concept of “soft power,” one that features
centrally in the article on soft power and the new information technologies we read.
a. defining soft power
Joseph Nye is a former assistant secretary of defense in the U.S. government, former
dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and now a professor at the
Kennedy School. In recent years, he has been identified with his famous “soft power”
thesis, an argument most comprehensively explored in his 2004 book, Softpower: The
Means to Success in World Politics. Nye is an American liberal: that means he is critical of
the excessive or unjust use of American power, while believing that t英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】his same power is a
force for good in the world. A former senior defense bureaucrat, Nye’s voice is that of a
wise counsel to, rather a harsh critic of, the world’s only superpower.
Nye defines power as “an ability to do things and control others, to get others to do what
they would otherwise not.” While the definition of the word “power” has not changed much
since Aristotle wrote his treatise on politics in 350 BCE, the nature of power has changed significantly. Where power has historically involved a hard emphasis on military force, and
th
the direct control of land and people, such as was evident in the colonial era, the late 20
century has been the stage for a new form of power that partly eclipses the hard form: soft
power. Nye defines soft power as follows: “… when one country gets other countries to
want what it wants… in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do
what it wants.” (75). He elaborates on this definition later, asserting that soft power is “the
ability of a country to structure a situation so that other countries develop preferences or
define their interests in ways consistent with its own” (77).
In a more specific sense, soft power is power as exercised through technology, value-
added skills, diplomacy, economic growth, communication, and culture. The liberation—or
invasion, depending on how you see it—of Iraq in 2003 was a “hard power” exercise. It
involved massive numbers of soldiers and h
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