Russian Sharp Power – When the Soft Becomes Sharp [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

he dissertation examines the concept of Russian sharp power in relation to soft power, power, domestic authoritarian practices, and Russian strategic discourse. Its starting point is a conceptual problem that has become increasingly visible in the study of contemporary international influence: the tendency to classify almost any non-military or non-economic influence as soft power. Joseph Nye's original formulation of soft power was based on attraction, credibility, political values, culture, and the perceived legitimacy of foreign policy. In much subsequent political and academic usage, however, soft power has often been reduced to a simple non-military opposite of hard power. This reduction creates analytical confusion, because practices such as disinformation, censorship, manipulation, intimidation, narrative distortion, and the strategic exploitation of open information spaces contradict the voluntary and attraction-based logic of soft power. The emergence of sharp power scholarship, especially through the work of Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig, was an important response to this conceptual confusion. Their argument was that authoritarian influence should not be mistaken for soft power when it penetrates, manipulates, or distorts the political and informational environments of democratic societies. Existing scholarship has been especially strong in showing how authoritarian states exploit media plurality, academic freedom, publishing, civil society, and open public debate. However, the dissertation argues that this literature remains incomplete if sharp power is understood only at the institutional level. Democratic openness is not merely institutional. It is also intellectual, normative, and ideational. The dissertation therefore approaches Russian sharp power as a form of authoritarian influence that instrumentalizes what democratic societies usually treat as strengths: openness, pluralism, self-criticism, academic freedom, media diversity, civil society, and public debate. The Russian case is particularly suitable for this inquiry because Russia possesses substantial cultural, historical, linguistic, and religious resources, yet these resources have not translated into durable soft power in the Nyean sense. The dissertation argues that Russia's soft-power weakness stems not from the absence of cultural tradition, but from the lack of broader political attractiveness. Censorship, repression, human rights violations, the decline of rule of law, military aggression, and the limited attractiveness of contemporary Russian political life have all damaged the credibility of Russian political values and foreign policy. The topic is also justified by the post-2014 and especially post-2022 deterioration of Russia's international image. Russia's annexation of Crimea, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the expansion of domestic censorship, the persecution of dissent, and the deepening militarization of public discourse all intensified the need to distinguish between attraction-based influence and manipulative authoritarian influence. The dissertation treats Russian sharp power as a compensatory strategy: where attraction is weak, Russia turns to discrediting others; where credibility is absent, it promotes distrust; where its own political model lacks appeal, it presents democracy as hypocritical, decadent, unstable, or no better than authoritarianism.