Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Evaluating Soft Power: Toward a Comparative Framework
Chapter 3: Japan: Culture, Pop Culture, and the National Brand
Chapter 4: Venezuela: Telesur and the Artillery of Ideas
Chapter 5: China: Cultivating a Global Soft Power
Chapter 6: United States of America: Public Diplomacy 2.0 and 21st Century Statecraft
Chapter 7: Conclusion

The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in Global Contexts provides a comparative assessment of public diplomacy and strategic communication initiatives in order to portray how Joseph Nye's notion of "soft power" has translated into context-specific strategies of international influence. The book examines four cases-Japan, Venezuela, China, and the United States-to illuminate the particular significance of culture, foreign publics, and communication technologies for the foreign policy ambitions of each country.

This study explores the notion of soft power as a set of theoretical arguments about power, and as a reflection of how nation-states perceive what is an increasingly necessary perspective on international relations in an age of ubiquitous global communication flows and encroaching networks of non-state actors. Through an analysis of policy discourse, public diplomacy initiatives, and related programs of strategic influence, soft power in each case represents a localized set of assumptions about the requirements of persuasion, the relevance of foreign audiences to state goals, and the perception of what counts as a soft power resource. This timely analysis provides an unprecedented comparative investigation of the relationship between soft power and public diplomacy.