Compound soft power: the BRICS and the multilateralization of soft power

This article offers a complementary analysis to the prevailing literature on soft power by addressing the issue of multilateral soft power. While the prevailing literature on soft power tends to look at how soft power manifests itself within individual nations, this article attempts to analyze the manifestations of collective soft power in the vehicle of a multilateral organization. This can be referred to this as compound soft power. Such an analysis looks at a macro-level class of soft power. In doing so, it looks more broadly at the configuration of the forest, in contradistinction to the prevailing research on soft power, which looks predominantly at individual trees (i.e. individual country analysis). While this analysis of compound soft power is undertaken specifically within the context of the BRICS, it is intended to be generalized to the study of all international organizations.