Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Discourse, Affinity And Attraction: A Case Study Of Iran's Soft Power Strategy In Afghanistan, Hiva Feizi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a case study of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s approach to soft power with a focus on Iran’s use of soft power in Afghanistan. This dissertation is unique as it a delves into the diverse conceptual prescriptions on soft power, especially from a non-Western perspective. Studies of soft power in the current International Relations discipline ignore the implicit widespread liberal democratic bias in the current understanding of the concept. This dissertation argues that there are certain ontological assumptions lying deep within the soft power model first proposed by Joseph Nye (1990) that make it difficult to use …