Soft power of Russia and China in Central Asia

Transcript:Soft power of Russia and China in Central Asia:
Soft power of Russia and China in Central Asia presentation for V Chinese-Russian Summer School on International Relations Dmitry Ontoev Head of Regional Studies Lab SKOLKOVO Institute for Emerging Market Studies July 6, 2015 Moscow Overview 2 What is soft power? How can soft power be measured? Central Asia: context Russian soft power in Central Asia: Goals Major trends and instruments Limitations Chinese soft power in Central Asia Goals Major trends and instruments Limitations Other soft power players in the region Potential scope of cooperation between Russia and China What is soft power? 3 What is power in international relations? The ability to influence the behavior of others to get the outcomes one wants. Nye finds three basic ways to do this: coercion, induction and attraction. Does soft power exist? Despite the widespread usage of the word, some sceptics say that the only power worthy of the word is military or economic power as power implies coercion. What is soft power? Is it a resource or interaction? One of the most debated topics – can soft power be accumulated and lost, can one say that one state has “more soft power” than another state? Or is soft power a set of technologies and instrument of attraction and cooptation in international relations? How powerful is soft power? What is the difference between hard and soft power? How manageable is soft power? Who wields it? How can soft power be measured? 4 Why measure? If it can be measured it can and will be managed What to measure? The best measure of the soft power would be the results obtained by such initiatives. We can measure the amount of foreign students in the country’s universities or the box office of its films abroad, but how do these impacts are going to affect policies and politics is a hard question. So what can we do? As the contextual-dependent interactions are almost impossible to measure, most researchers utilize either of the two main approaches: Sociology or statistics Sociological methods were refined by Simon Anholt and rely on massive polls on one country’s image in another Statistical methods treat soft power as a resource and measure either a country’s capability to produce soft power or its direct results How can soft power be measured: Country Brands Index 5 Top 10 in 2014: Germany United States United Kingdom France Canada Japan Italy Switzerland Australia Sweden Top