Practices of soft power: A comparison of South Korea and Turkey from the 1990s to 2017

Abstract

Throughout the history, power has been conceived as the ability to get what you want through inducement or threats which is basically called hard power and states have been longly practicing hard power in order to get what they want from other nations. Distinctly from the conventional perception of power, many countries utilize soft power to gain what they want in the international arena in the 21st century. Foremost among them, Korea and Turkey the “brother nations” which have similar modern historical developments have been decidedly employing cultural diplomacy strategies and trying to gain a leverage in the international arena. In this thesis, soft power practices of the both countries were investigated and their global soft power rankings were compared based on Joseph Nye’s theory on three sources of soft power as cultural attractiveness, universal foreign policies and legitimate domestic politics.