The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power, 2nd Edition

9 THE USE OF THE SOFT POWER CONCEPT IN EMPIRICAL STUDIES

Douglas Henrique Novelli and Alexsandro Eugenio Pereira

DOI: 10.4324/9781003189756-10

Introduction

Having gained popularity since its creation, research on soft power until the 2010s has often served as a source for problematic theoretical conceptualizations. Even Joseph Nye, its original proponent, warned that ‘the term [had] been stretched and twisted, sometimes beyond recognition’ (Nye 2006). Other authors have reinforced these warnings, underlining that research on soft power has often been undertheorized and analytically imprecise (Li 2009; Womack 2010), while the concept was misunderstood and misused due to a lack of academic refinement (Ichihara 2006), with the term being wrongly ...