If there is a region in the world prone to lazy heuristics of geopolitics, it is surely central Asia. While long derided by academic specialists, much foreign policy thinking towards the post-Soviet south continues to be underlined by great power battles, absence of local agency and the predominance of hard power. As such, Kirill Nourzhanov and Sebastien Peyrouse's excellent edited volume is a very welcome addition. In it, the contributors demonstrate both the value and the limits of Joseph Nye's much-vaunted concept of soft power for our understanding of international relations in central Asia. After a critical introduction to the concept, part one features chapters from Nourzhanov and Peyrouse on Russia and China respectively, alongside an equally significant contribution by Alexander Diener and Vincent Artman on the United States. Further chapters on the European Union, Turkey and Israel follow, whereas Iran and India are notably absent from the book. The chapters on the great powers are perhaps most illustrative of the conundrum of analysing soft power in central Asia. By Nye's original definition, the US is an effective proponent of soft power in the region, with considerable success in its educational and cultural programmes, notwithstanding the occasional disaster. As an example, the American promotion of LGBT rights under Presiden Barack Obama elicited a backlash that worsened conditions for sexual minorities and harmed the US's reputation (p. 29). In contrast, Russia and China have been latecomers—and relatively clumsy protagonists—in the struggle over soft power. Nonetheless, China has seen a drop-off in Sinophobia and an increase in its powers of attraction, while Russia remains the indispensable power in the region, popular with all generations. Most of the contributors are area specialists and hence explain these counter-intuitive outcomes in terms of context. China's proximity and surge of economic engagement and Russia's historical and cultural links give them enormous advantages over western states. Yet the contributors also point to key problems with the concept of soft power: a superficial category that describes outcomes of foreign policy better than it helps us to understand the mechanisms of attraction and persuasion. Two problems with the concept are revealed by the case-study chapters on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. These countries play a dual role as recipients and purveyors of soft power. To overcome both limitations, the contributors find that they must go beyond soft power to explain their findings. The first problem regards Nye's limited conception of soft power actors: the state and civil society. The contributors exceed these simple levels of analysis to include the spheres of transnational flows of media, education, migration and humanitarianism. Actors in these spaces proliferate, many of them being global, and some have no conception or even awareness of soft power. For instance, the large rise in students attending Chinese and Russian universities, as well as central Asia's persistent reliance on Russian media and labour markets, cannot be categorized as merely matters of state and civil society. Instead, they are indicative of a regionality whereby central Asian republics remain deeply integrated with Russia and also increasingly tied to China. Immigration to Russia is especially significant as noted by Aminat Chokobaeva and Drew Ninnis (p. 230). Equally, the nature of the energy market and the Russian and Chinese styles of doing business, through clientelist relations that are harder for western companies to emulate, demonstrate that any analysis of how soft power is attained must look at a wider array of networked actors. As the chapter by Reuel R. Hanks notes, ‘Russia's relatively poor showing on global soft power indices belies its potential to exercise soft power in the regional setting of Central Eurasia’ (p. 200). The wider array of actors and issues of soft power is not merely a contextual factor, but can be found in any region. It indicates a second conceptual problem in how soft power conceives of power itself. The binary of hard versus soft power is too blunt and it fails to grasp the relationality of power. Power can be coercive (hard power) but it can also be ‘exchange’ or, more enduringly, ‘integrative’ power. China's vast increases in trade with central Asia have intensified its regional relations of exchange and, in so far as these changes flow through state actors, this may increase China's power to attract and persuade. Russia's own extensive political, economic, social and cultural links point to something more like integrative power between Russia and central Asia, whereby Russian influence remains strong more than 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Neither public relations nor national branding by other states can erode Russia's regional advantages. Overall, this excellent book highlights these conceptional limitations and demonstrates how soft power often reflects these underlying transnational linkages.
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John Heathershaw (2022) studied this question.