CONCEPT
Malevolent Soft Power
Elaine Kamarck's 2018 extension of Nye's framework to describe the weaponization of soft-power channels — the use of cultural, informational, and institutional mechanisms designed for attraction to deliver manipulation instead.
Malevolent soft power is Elaine Kamarck's 2018 conceptual extension of Nye's framework, introduced in her Brookings Institution paper "Malevolent Soft Power, AI, and the Threat to Democracy." The concept inverts Nye's soft power: where soft power operates through the genuine attractiveness of a nation's culture, values, and institutions, malevolent soft power hijacks the same channels to deliver manipulation rather than attraction. The operations do not coerce. They do not threaten military action or impose sanctions. They operate through the channels of cultural influence — social media, news media, information ecosystems — and shape preferences not through the attractiveness of the manipulator's values but through the exploitation of divisions in the target population.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Kamarck's immediate subject was Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election, which she characterized as the exercise of malevolent soft power. The operations did not attempt to convince Americans that Russian values were attractive. They attempted to inflame American divisions, undermine