Janice Bially Mattern

Historically, we can identify, at different eras, certain technologies or technological domains that are recognized as powerful, they provide military and strategic leverage to their holders. Developing, procuring, and stockpiling these capabilities is usually highly demanding and requires massive investments of national resources at a large scale.

Soft power—the ability to achieve desired outcomes through attraction rather than coercion—has become an important part of scholarly thinking and policy practice with respect to world politics. And yet attraction, the core component of soft power, has been largely neglected in scholarly research. Research has been undertaken, policy suggestions offered, and ethical conclusions about soft power drawn all on the basis of implicit and often unacknowledged assumptions about attraction.