An Introduction to Soft Power: the Case Study of Psychological Operations, Rumor and Propaganda

One of the common topics in political literature is power and its derivatives. Power approaches govern the international relations and foreign policy arenas. Hence, studying power and its various facets appears to be necessary. Following the consecutive failures and heavy material and spiritual losses, political actors came to ignore hard power and depend upon a more reliable and efficient type of power, which is known as soft power/war in political theories. On the other hand, it is obvious that benefiting from only hardware and physical resources isn’t sufficient in information and media age and users of power have to utilize modern technologies in information and communication fields so that the goals can be fulfilled with low material and life costs and a higher rate of legitimacy. To accomplish this, for the first time, soft power was introduced by Josef Nye by renovating the features of hard power. This kind of power makes use of some modern tools including psychological operations, spreading rumors, poisoned propaganda, cybernetics, media, satellites, intelligence combat, strategic deception, etc. Examining soft power and its various aspects, this article looks into psychological operations or war, rumor, and propaganda as functional soft power tools.