Fidel Abowei. Nigeria’s Soft Power in Anglophone West Africa: Insights from Ghana and Liberia. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. xiii + 223 pp. $180.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9781032500362.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: This book provides an empirical, theoretically grounded analysis of Nigeria's soft power in contemporary West Africa with specific focus on Ghana and Liberia.The author seeks to understand how Nigeria, despite her internal development challenges and jaundiced international image, has deployed her soft power to drive statecraft.Schematically divided into eight chapters, it assesses the three key theories of soft power-namely liberalism, constructivism, and realism-and provides insights on how Nigeria's soft power posturing has been received, particularly by the elites in Ghana and Liberia.Soft power, seen as the ability of a state to deploy intangible resources such as culture, political values, norms, and ideals to attract or alter the behavior of another state is built on "attractiveness" as both a resource and as a behavior.The book further explores the three fundamental approaches of soft power, namely: the agent-central, the subject-centered, and outcome-based approaches.While the subject-centered approach focuses on what the subjects of power perceive, and this is often based on media projections that bring the country to an evaluation, the outcome-based approach involves the agent's resources and the behavior of the subject towards the agent, which determine the effects of the relations.If mainstreamed into national development, soft power can translate into power resources to build attraction and alter state behavior in the international scene.Such resources include political agentsubject relations, military capability, and economic resources.The book provides an engaging diplomatic history of West Africa in general and Nigeria in particular, taking into account the impact of shared historical, geographical, and economic ties in inter-state relations.The contiguous geographical nature of West Africa suffused with a common history of European colonialism account for the rapid diffusion and assimilation of sociocultural norms and values across artificially created geopolitical boundaries.European colonialism and the balkanization of the region into different spheres of influences (Anglo-phone, Francophone, and Lusophone) continue to undermine, peaceful regional inter-state relations in West Africa.The need to overcome the challenges of colonialism, the author argues, led to the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and later the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).Nigeria played significant leadership roles in the formation of these organizations.This strategy, including an intimidating
Source: African Studies Review
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2024.221
Author: Danladi Abah
Institution: University of Ghana
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: University of Ghana
OpenAlex ID: W4405581991