The Fragmented Spectacle of China’s Soft Power in Africa

The manuscript interrogates whether a non-Western, state-driven soft power project can offer a viable alternative to the American Dream, especially in parts of the world where the US power is being contested, such as Africa, and specifically, Ethiopia. By positioning major Chinese cultural diplomacy efforts on the ground against their American counterparts, this book aims at reformulating cultural and discursive power through the lens of the Chinese experience and thereby to expand and perhaps even question (and unravel) the long-standing US-centric soft power conception coined by Joseph Nye and widely used by international relations theorists. 

China’s Global Soft Power (Under Contract, Cambridge Elements Global China Series)

This book written for a wide audience of academics, policy-makers, and journalists, explains the origins of Chinese soft power, the political motivations and ideologies behind it, the institutions involved in promoting it, and the efficacy of its instruments globally. This is the first book to grapple with the multi-dimensional scholarship on soft power and to present a clear, concise analytical account about how we should think about Chinese soft power in the 21st century.

To see a full list of research, please refer to Maria's Curriculum Vitate→