Emerging forms of power in global politics

Smart Power

According to Chester A. Crocker, smart power "involves the strategic use of diplomacy, persuasion, capacity building, and the projection of power and influence in ways that are cost-effective and have political and social legitimacy" – essentially the engagement of both military force and all forms of diplomacy.

people think that hard power alone is sufficient. Some people equate soft power with winning over the “hearts and minds” of others, but to be effective you need to use a combination of both hard and soft power.

Jospeh Nye cites examples in this regard.The USA could not use soft power effectively to persuade the Taliban government to give up the sites they used for Al Qaeda and  had to use force, hard power, against the Taliban government.

Similarly, when it comes to the broader question of winning over the hearts and minds of the main stream Muslims so that the hardliners cannot recruit them, the situation requires soft power. When the ‘Uncle Sam’  used  hard power in Iraq, they essentially made themselves look like a bully and an occupier which undercut their soft power.Hence,Nye suggests to recover the ability to combine soft power with  hard power if they have to build the capacity to use smart power.

Fast power:-

This concept has been given by John Chipman.On the model of Neo Darwinism ,he underlines that in international politics it is not survival of the fittest but survival of the fastest.

Speed has become an important element in international affairs, like the rapid deployment of forces by the military or the foreign ministry sending a special envoy in an emergency situation. Speed is an important attribute of power in global affairs and certainly PM Modi has himself exercised fast power by acting very quickly on many issues, taking initiatives quickly and implementing   them fast. The idea is not to not let the bureaucracy impede important diplomatic foreign policy initiatives.

This can be seen in decisions to conduct surgical strikes by Indian military on the terrorist bases in Pakistan as preemptive strikes in the interest of national security.

Sharp power

 Joseph Nye provides this definition of sharp power: The deceptive use of information for hostile purpose. It is used to describe aggressive and subversive policies employed by

authoritarian governments as a projection of state power in democratic countries, policies that cannot be described as either hard power or soft power.

 The Russian state-funded RT News Network and the Chinese state-sponsored Confucius Institute educational partnerships are examples of sharp power. Autocratic states are not necessarily seeking to 'win hearts and minds,' the common frame of reference for soft power efforts, but they are surely seeking to manipulate their target audiences by distorting the information that reaches them.

Nye applies the strategy that consists of promoting a notion or a term that purportedly describes the other side’s behavior with the aim of leaving the impression that one’s own side is innocent of that behavior. If, for example, we complain that the enemy is guilty of torture, everyone will assume that we must be opposed to and innocent of such practices. And if it turns out we have also resorted to torture, then we can claim we only did it because it gave them an unfair advantage.