...the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games is estimated to have been watched live by more than 1 billion people. Therefore, for a few hours on the night of July 27th, Britain enjoyed a complete monopoly of television sets across the globe. Through its narrative in the opening ceremony it was able to highlight specific features of Britain and either introduce or remind the world of these.

Australia has always punched above its weight at the Olympics and was perhaps the first country to realize the soft power that can be harnessed by sporting success on the international stage.

While the US was flexing its muscles in Iraq and Afghanistan... taking a much less outspoken but nonetheless more effective approach of "soft power" penetrated the abandoned regions. The role of the frontrunner among new patrons of the developed world was unambiguously taken by China, which has established itself as the number one trade partner and a prominent investor not only in Africa...

Since their launch in 2004, the Beijing-backed Confucius Institutes have been no strangers to controversy. While their defenders liken them to the Chinese equivalents of the Goethe Institute, the Alliance Francaise and the British Council, their critics have christened them fonts of espionage and propaganda – charges which, though salacious, are still unsubstantiated

A recent Yahoo! Japan search for “sofuto pawa,” the Japanese translation for soft power, yielded nearly two and a half million entries. While this number indicates the term’s popularity in Japan, it tells us little about how successful Tokyo has been in employing soft power throughout the Western Pacific.

Although coined by Joseph Nye, the practice of soft-power diplomacy is of course nothing new...However, it has never before served as the central tenant of American foreign policy strategy because previous administrations always recognized that soft-power diplomacy does not work in the absence of hard-power leverage.

The Olympic Games and the World Cup offer host cities and countries a unique opportunity to make their mark on the world stage. However, such global sporting events aren't always held just for fun. According to Loïc Ravenel, the Games are always viewed as a statement on the national and international stage.