What is “Sharp Power”?

Oraz Kereibayev
Nov 6 · 4 min read

One of the basic political concepts students learn at university explains what power is. While most people have an idea of the word “power”, they can’t exactly define what factors make country less or more powerful. Political scientists provide a clear distinction between classic types of powers a country might gain: soft and hard. However, in 2017, Jessica Ludwig and Christopher Walker introduced a new term called “sharp power”.

To explain what sharp power is, it would be relevant to draw a border between more traditional hard and soft powers and what factors represent each of them.

The most obvious factor that demonstrates country’s power is its military force and how innovative it is. Country’s ability to physically confront another country creates its hard power. The Gatling gun played a big role as a new way of fighting during the American Civil War. Similar logic applies to the poison gas in WWI. For the last decades, nuclear weapon has been one of the biggest sources of potential military strength.

The concept of soft power was introduced by Joseph S. Nye Jr. in 1980s. If hard power is something visible like military force or economy, soft power is something one can’t touch but feel. Respect and sympathy one country gains shows its soft power. The presence of soft power makes militarily vulnerable countries more important players in the political arena. Since the world today is globalized, every country is constantly performing in front of all other countries. Everyone is looking at country’s statements and decisions. To gain soft power, relatively rich countries might support its less economically developed neighbors. A country might also join international peaceful organizations to show its concern about a viral topic.

In their “The Meaning of Sharp Power: How Authoritarian States Project Influence”, Walker and Ludwig reply to Nye saying that “soft power” can’t explain all invisible techniques of gaining power. To clarify what soft power is, they introduce a concept of “sharp power” which uses a tactic to gain power by undermining soft power from other countries. Sharp power’s users don’t take soft power from others randomly; they choose players with an opposing ideology as its target. Those countries either promote their ideology in other countries or point at the weaknesses of other countries’ ideas. Country that uses sharp power concentrates on manipulation through social media and initiatives in foreign countries.

Comparing to hard and soft powers, sharp power wouldn’t become a new trend without a widespread of technologies and social networks around the world. Sharp power is an important tool of manipulation not so much because of its quality, but because of its quantity. Anyone can open a social network and type what this person wants. Together with that, anyone can get information through these social networks.

Walker and Ludwig write that sharp power, being very cheap to use and spread, becomes a big problem for democracies because it is mostly used by authoritarian states. They state that China and Russia were the first countries using it so frequently and obviously. They exemplify it by the Confucius Institutions, a non-profit public educational organization affiliated with the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, which puts Chinese ideology above others’. They also show the Russia Today (RT) as an example of sharp power made by Russia.

“You come to learn that these stories must conform to a basic principle: make the U.S. and the West look bad,” says a former RT presenter Liz Wahl to Walker and Ludwig.

Nye responds to Walker and Ludwig in his article “How Sharp Power Threatens Soft Power: The Right and Wrong Ways to Respond to Authoritarian Influence”. He states that sharp power is not something new and it has been used during the Cold War by both the US and USSR. At the same time, he admits that never has sharp power been such a popular tool in politics.

Nye also says that sharp power works as a way to undermine soft power, but it also undermines it from a user of sharp power. After starting using sharp power, China lost public approval of Australia which shows incapacity of sharp power in a way of gaining soft power.

Nye admits that sharp power is used mostly by authoritarian regimes rather than democracies. He also says that democracies should not go too far trying to confront autocrats’ sharp power because eventually democracies might start using sharp power.

“Democracies have not yet developed adequate strategies for deterrence and resilience,” says Nye.

Robert Phillips, Jr., professor of political science in American University in Bulgaria, says that the possibility of sharp power has always been there. However, nobody has ever thought about using words in that way. “Sharp power is the weaponization of language or arguments, or images with the intent to damage the state’s soft power,” says Phillips.

Phillips also says that sharp power is mostly used against democracies, but he admits that it might be used by any state and even non-state actors against anyone. He sees that right now everyone is shocked by sharp power since it is a new tool, but with time, sharp power as a concept will be normalized. He says, “Two can play that game now, all members of the UN can play that game now.”

Saying that sharp power is going to be a more popular tool, he emphasizes that, in theory, sharp power is not a bad or good thing.

“Sharp power is neutral. It’s like any power. It’s just neutral. You can use a particular power for good and you can use a particular power for very base or bad purposes. And it depends upon the goals over user of power. It has nothing to do with the power itself. It’s the people behind it,” says Phillips.