The Yegiora Files

The quality of this music video is really good.

This change in international relations, where the BoP and elements of national power to do with military preparedness were rendered unfashionable in the 21 st Century, paved the way for the emergence of a new tool for analysis. Joseph Nye’s soft and hard power theory rose to prominence, especially soft power itself by far became the key catch phrase in this contemporary era of interdependence in globalization. [1]   Nye talked about how hard power resources like military capability and economic strengthen no longer posses the ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’ like authority to influence a state. [2] In essence, Nye was giving his analysis of how the world was changing and simply admitting the fact that hard power resources were becoming unfashionable because of the evolution of power as a concept. The rise of nationalism, cost of going to war, development of weapons of mass destruction, interdependence and international trade are demonstrations of changes that have occurred in time resulti...

In social science, the concept of power is used widely in different contexts. In social relationships, a parent has power over a child, in a remote village in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) a village chief has the ability to influence the actions of others in the village, and a police officer as a law enforcement agent uses the power vested on him by a nation’s constitution to exercise authority over individuals to ensure there is order in society.  Furthermore, there are numerous other applications of power in daily life, or in different branches of knowledge, but what is more important in this body of knowledge is the use of power to define the relationship and status of states in the international system, that is power is to international relations like honey is to bees, or like water is to plants. The concept of power is the bedrock on which the study of international relations is built on.  From this logic, the conventional behavioral definition of power u...