Scope, mechanism, and outcome: arguing soft power in the context of public diplomacy

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 diplomacy 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.