Higher Education as a Resource of Russia’s “Soft Power” under the New Geopolitical Conditions. Part 1: Literature Review and Problem Statement

Abstract

The increasing employment of military force and the decline of the culture of dialog between states have increased the focus on non-military ways of problem solving, i. e., the use of “soft power” in international relations. The first section of the paper deals with the analysis of academic sources on the issue of utilizing higher education as a resource of “soft power” in international relations. The author presents an overview of the existing academic works on the functional essence of higher education in international relations, and provides a concise analysis of scholarly papers on the issue of using the educational sphere as the resource of “soft power” on the example of Russia. The results of empirical analysis will be highlighted in the next section of the article.As an underlying theory of the study, the author relies on Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power”. The author analyzes two types of sources: academic papers and the textbooks by Russian (Lebedeva M., Rustamova L., Ageeva V., Schmidt S., etc.) and foreign authors (Atkinson C., Carr E., Crowley-Vigneau A. et al., Lomer S., etc.) on the issues of “soft power” in general, and “soft power” of higher education specifically.Two main conclusions have been drawn building on the research findings. Firstly, the major tool for the implementation of soft power in higher education is international student mobility. Secondly, the main functional essence of higher education in international relations consists in shaping and changing students’ political and ideological attitudes via the transfer of culture, ideas and values of the host country.