Political Power & Foreign Policy Analysis

Political Power of Many Faces Political power is considered to be one of the central concepts of social sciences yet one of the most troublesome. Contemporary discourses of power lead to a constant emergence of new notions and terms that at some point have started to overlap. We can observe clear differences in power definitions across disciplines and specific debates, across regions and cultures, across approaches of scientists and practitioners. Nevertheless these usages and visions of political power present different perspectives that need to be examined in order to develop this extremely important research field. This section aims at exploring multifaceted nature of political power and how this cluster of concepts is used to answer particular research questions. We invite contributions that share a commitment to rigorous conceptual analysis of power, focus on theoretical and methodological issues. We encourage papers that link theory to practice, deal with particular cases and analyses of discourses and policies. We will also provide room for discussions on political power in international relations. We are especially interested in attracting papers that show how changes in world politics have affected the importance of soft power relative to hard. Papers that present the consequences of this re-balancing process for foreign policies and strategies of particular countries.