Deprovincializing Soft Power

A Global Historical Approach, 1990-2020

This project originally grew out of my curiosity about what happened, starting in the 1990s as the U.S.’s “Irresistible Empire” faced decline. It struck me that “Soft Power” was another of those ingenious American social inventions: a concept invented whole cloth to identify a problem, a organization and marketing tactic to solve it, a cultural commodity/ diplomatic technique to be exported globally, an import welcomed with its all of its cultural and political baggage world-wise, later an object to be indigenized and turned to new local uses to balance against U.S. hegemony. This project took shape by making several moves. One was to treat its U.S. promoters as norm entrepreneurs. The second was refocus the scope of study from the Transatlantic World and the struggle between American Soft and European Normative Power so that we could explore the diffusion of the concept from a global perspective. The third was to capture the interest in the problematic from scholars with regional expertise, working in international relations, media studies, and communications history and for all of us to puzzle out how to develop a shared vocabulary, that wasn’t American, to explore the problem.

The development of ideas and papers initiated with funding from the European Institute’s Initiative on Cultural Power in International Relations, and the Columbia President’s Global Innovation Fund at Columbia University under the rubric “De-Provincializing Soft Power: A Global-Historical Approach.”

The workshops, coordinated by Buru Baykurt, met at Columbia University in January 2015, at Istanbul in June 2015, at Beijing in June 2016, at Sao Paolo in March 2017, and at, again, Columbia University in December 2018, with a finale Two Hegemonic Restructuring Projects in Diachronic Perspective: America's Marshall Plan (1948-1951) and China's Belt and Road Initiative (2013).

The book coming out of this project is titled, “Soft-Power Internationalism 1990-2020: Cultural Struggles over International Order.” See the table of contents here.

Download the PDF here:

Download the PDF here

Download the PDF here:

Download the PDF here

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