MARGINALIA: A Social Constructivist Student’s Tribute to Joseph Nye, Jr.

MAKATI CITY (MindaNews / 8 May) – “Power is the ability to get what you want.”

Joseph Nye didn’t just say it. He reframed it—reimagined it, softened it, and made it resonate beyond bullets and ballots.

And on Tuesday, May 6, 2025, the world of International Relations lost one of its intellectual architects—not of steel-and-firepower realism, but of something subtler: influence, attraction, and persuasion. Joseph Nye, the father of soft power, is no more.

My first encounter with Joseph Nye wasn’t in a Harvard lecture hall or an international conference. It was in a classroom half a world away—at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran, in 1998. I was a freshly enrolled MA student in International Relations, still wrestling with the vocabulary of IR theory: anarchy, sovereignty, hegemony, norms.

It was through the tandem writings of Nye and Keohane, often lumped together in syllabi like Lennon and McCartney, that I began to appreciate the nuances within Neoliberalism. Before that, during my IR undergraduate days at Mindanao State University, I only had access to the classics—Hans Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations and the rather formal tone of Miriam Defensor Santiago’s 1975 International Relations textbook. The landscape was rigid, dominated by the realism-liberalism binary. Power was about tanks and treaties. That was it.

Until Nye whispered otherwise.

In his 1990s theory of soft power, Nye posited something that felt almost heretical in the field: the idea that a state’s cultural values, political ideals, and foreign policies—when seen as legitimate—can attract others and shape outcomes without force or payments. This was a welcome breeze for someone like me, raised in a society where armed struggle and peace processes tangoed daily. It made sense—especially in a world increasingly shaped by media, technology, and transnational symbols.

But what truly made Nye’s contribution stand out, at least for me, was this: it opened the theoretical door for a non-military, discursive reading of power—a move that resonated deeply with my eventual leanings toward Social Constructivism.

I wish I could say I embraced constructivism and was celebrated for it. I wasn’t. In fact, my early academic love affair with Alexander Wendt’s constructivist critique of Kenneth Waltz’s Structural Realism nearly cost me my dissertation.

My plan was ambitious. I wanted to critique the assumptions of anarchy and identity in Waltz’s “Theory of International Politics” and contrast them with Wendt’s “anarchy is what states make of it.” But that plan had to pass through the gate of an octogenarian professor—a staunch Positivist at the University of Tehran. To him, post-positivist approaches were not just unconventional. They were “not worthy of research.”

And so, I compromised.

After months of mental tug-of-war, I settled for something that could sneak through the gates: S. Barry Barnes’ sociological theory of power as social order, applied to International Quds Day in cyberspace. But even then, I couldn’t resist returning to Nye’s soft power theory as a bridge. His work provided the conceptual tools to understand influence outside traditional coercion—something very useful when studying symbolic online mobilization.

To the strict disciplinarians of IR theory, Nye was firmly on the positivist side, his theory rooted in empirical analysis and measurable influence. But to a constructivist like me, Nye felt closer than the realists would admit.

After all, soft power isn’t just about tools—it’s about meaning. It’s about how cultural narratives, legitimacy, and perception shape the behavior of states and non-state actors. It’s about identity, norms, and values—all central to constructivist thought.

Nye helped reframe what counts as “power” in IR. And by doing so, he inadvertently gave students like me the courage to question not just what power does, but how we come to understand power in the first place.

Joseph Nye may be gone, but his ideas are not. In classrooms from Davao to Cambridge, students will still debate the merits of hard versus soft power. But for someone who once sat in a Tehran classroom, struggling to fit Wendt’s sentences into an IR world that wasn’t quite ready, Nye’s legacy is not just academic—it’s personal.

He opened a discursive space. And that space allowed me to walk—tentatively, then boldly—into the contested terrain of post-positivist thought.

So, Professor Nye, this student from Sub-Saharan Mindanao says: thank you. You softened the edges of a hard discipline. And that’s a power no tank can match.

[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mansoor L. Limba, PhD in International Relations and Shari‘ah Counselor-at-Law (SCL), is a publisher-writer, university professor, vlogger, chess trainer, and translator (from Persian into English and Filipino) with tens of written and translation works to his credit on such subjects as international politics, history, political philosophy, intra-faith and interfaith relations, cultural heritage, Islamic finance, jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalam), Qur’anic sciences and exegesis (tafsir), hadith, ethics, and mysticism. He can be reached at mlimba@diplomats.com and www.youtube.com/@WayfaringWithMansoor, and his books can be purchased at www.elzistyle.com and www.amazon.com/author/mansoorlimba.]