The concept of soft power in Russian foreign policy in the twenty-first century

Abstract

The paper analyses the application of the concept of soft power in contemporary international relations in the case of the implementation of the foreign policy of the Russian Federation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author departs with the assumption that the government in Moscow uses a wide range of the soft power instruments and prove it on the case study of the combined use of hard and soft power instruments during the engagement in Syria. The analysis also includes the recent Russian foreign policy actions towards Serbia, and stresses out that the Russian Federation does not recognise sufficiently clear the benefits that our country provides in terms of promoting Russian national interests through the sophisticated application of the concept of soft power. The author concludes that the Russian Federation has not been using the full potential of their own sources of soft power in the foreign policy implementation process, and that the use of soft power is not sophisticated and optimal-except in the media.