Soft Power and Diplomacy
Soft power has a key role to play in the international politics of the 21st century. While hard power is classically based on military coercion or economic incentives, soft power builds on the forces of attraction that are fed, for example, by the values, culture or leading personalities of a given actor on the international stage.
The research focuses, on the one hand, on the theoretical elaboration and further differentiation of the soft power concept and its central components, such as public diplomacy and personal diplomacy. On the other hand, empirical studies are conducted in order to investigate questions of possible power shifts in the dimension of soft power as well as national soft power capacities and strategies of different states.