The concept of "soft power" in contemporary scientific discourse in Russia: dynamics, thematic structure, and semantic shift

The subject of the study is the appropriation of the concept of "soft power" in the Russian scientific discourse from 2004 to 2024 – a collection of academic texts on political science and international relations in which this notion is defined, contested, redefined, and applied to describe foreign policy practice. The object of analysis is the discourse itself as a structured set of statements, or more precisely, its observable infrastructure: published definitions, official formulations of doctrinal documents, thematic frameworks of scientific works, and Russia's positions in verifiable international indices of attractiveness; foreign policy practice as such remains outside the subject, as does the causal impact of the concept on research behavior or political decision-making, which are inaccessible to direct observation and are not addressed in this work. The study is conducted in the genre of qualitative interpretative discourse analysis, combining event-based periodization of publication activity, inductive thematic clustering of the corpus, and analysis of semantic shifts relative to the original interpretation by J. Nye. The focus is shifted from the immeasurable effect of the concept to the observable discursive infrastructure of its production and usage. The scientific novelty lies in synthesizing previously fragmented observations (overview, critical, discourse-analytical) into a unified three-axis framework for the appropriation of the concept (dynamics, themes, semantics), applicable to other borrowed concepts and national scientific fields. It has been established that the Russian discourse has gone from appropriation (up to 2012) through officialization and a spike (2012-2013) to critical revision (after 2014) and reinterpretation (after 2022). A central line of tension is the divergence between Nye's normative-resource interpretation and the domestic statist-instrumental reading; this divergence explains both theoretical disputes and practical difficulties in Russian attractiveness policy. The semantic thesis is confirmed documentarily, based on the texts of the Concepts from 2013 to 2023; the propositions about event dynamics and thematic asymmetry are formulated as testable hypotheses, sequentially aligning with the corpus and subject to strict bibliometric verification.