During the last decade, Professor Joseph S. Nye introduced and developed the concept of Smart Power as a combination of coercive and soft power to achieve goals in international relations, arguing that neither soft nor hard power alone could produce effective foreign policy.
A few years later, under the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton popularized smart power and defined it as choosing the right combination of tools – diplomatic, economic, political, legal, and cultural – for a particular situation.
In this article, Younes El Ghazi advocates for the concept of Smart Diplomacy as the practice of smart power beyond traditional diplomacy, identifying as well the three critical pillars that could grant effectiveness to this new paradigm: Digital Capabilities, Multi-Stakeholder Diplomacy and Feminist Diplomacy.
Image source: Pixabay – geralt (Public domain)