Experts weigh in on the role and use of soft power in education, arts, and culture in pursuit of crafting solutions to global conflicts and geopolitical tensions.

In photo (from left to right): Dr Marcos Centeno-Martín (University of Valencia, Spain), Dr Maria Montserrat Rifà-Valls (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain), and Professor Brendan Howe (Ewha Womans University, South Korea) during their panel discussion at BCE/BAMC2025

In a panel titled ‘Soft Power in Contested Spaces: Education and Arts for Peace’ moderated by IAFOR’s Provost, Professor Anne Boddington, panellists Dr Maria Montserrat Rifà-Valls of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain; Professor Brendan Howe of Ewha Womans University, South Korea; and Dr Marcos Centeno-Martín of the University of Valencia, Spain, addressed an ongoing dialogue within IAFOR revolving around the role and use of soft power in education, the arts, and culture. At IAFOR’s conference in Paris, the UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education, Dr Stefania Giannini, reminded us that hard power is not necessarily the best way to engage, communicate, and interact with others, especially in our increasingly polarised world. According to her, soft power as exercised through education, culture, and the arts can lead to innovative and peaceful solutions to conflict resolution. In this context, the creative industries and arts can generate alternative narratives, awareness building, whether that’s the real-life stories of refugees, various forms of creative activism, or public forms of communication, such as murals or documentary films. 

‘But soft power is often either soft in its language or gentle in its messaging,’ Professor Anne Boddington stated in her opening remarks. ‘It’s often hard-hitting, contested, and controversial. It’s often uncomfortable as a form of public or community conscience’. Within the current polarised context, educators have an even greater mission to create future citizens and societies that are respectful and tolerant. According to Professor Boddington, ‘as educators, what may be more important, far more so than the subject knowledge we deliver, is what and how we deploy the knowledge we have, how we learn, how we relearn, and how we educate our students to have a dialogue, to disagree agreeably and respectfully, to practice empathy and respect rather than endlessly circulate within those bubbles of friends’.

In photo: Dr Maria Montserrat Rifà-Valls (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Increasingly, arts, education, and culture must compete for space and for funding with other sectors, whether that is health, social care, or defence. Providing some hard data, Professor Boddington highlighted that the economic justification for backing arts and education does exist: creative industries contribute £126 billion (5%) to the UK economy, while in Spain, the arts contribute about 34 billion euros (3.2%) to the economy, in comparison to football (1.5%). 

Dr Rifà-Valls identified four key areas for examining visual culture’s role in dismantling narratives of conflict and war, further providing a justification for funding education and the arts. First, she touched upon the role of artists in subverting imperial narratives and geopolitical power by challenging borders, exposing structures of war, colonialism, and racism, and engaging with contemporary conflicts. Second, she mentioned that public pedagogies and art educators have the potential to act as cultural workers who foster peaceful societies and social transformation. Third, the plurality of childhoods and school environments are areas where children’s cultures respond to political, ecological, social, and economic crises, and where the architecture and ecological orientation of schools actively shape resilience, community, and learning. Finally, she provocatively questioned whether ‘soft power, a particularly visual popular culture of children and young people, is an instrument to regulate their lives, or an opportunity for them to transgress the limitations imposed by capitalism’.

In a provocative turn, Professor Howe opened his argument with the question: ‘Why bother with art and education? What’s the justification for it?’ Although education and artistic expression are ‘universal normative human rights’ and access to them has been widely endorsed, ‘that may no longer be enough,’ he said. While a lot of people may argue that we do not have to justify what is a normative human right, Professor Howe argued that ‘at a time when global geopolitical challenges and resurgent populist nationalism in domestic politics have forced a refocusing of policy and budgetary agendas back towards realpolitik and national interest, the call to do the morally right thing may no longer be sufficient.’ Instead, ‘stronger rational interest arguments must be made for the prioritisation of education and the arts’. 

In photo: Professor Brendan Howe (Ewha Womans University, South Korea)

According to him, the fact that recent events have linked education with death is a logical and valid argument to make for funding education and the arts. The ‘horrendous’ shooting of Charlie Kirk while debating on a university campus, the ‘massacre’ of students and other civilians on campuses in Gaza, and mass shootings of students and educators are all incidents that highlight that ‘education is not just important, it is quite literally a matter of life and death’. According to Professor Howe, it is through education and the arts that people are able to discover ‘shared interests rather than adversarial positions,’ and that ‘this is where the future of peace-building can be found’.

In response to the two arguments, Dr Centeno-Martín highlighted an area in which conflict and contestation are currently clearly visible in Europe: the migration issue. According to him, there is a disconnect between perception and reality in contemporary narratives of a migrant ‘invasion’ in Europe. Noting that Spain’s ageing society demographic challenges are similar to those of South Korea and Japan, he questioned why migration is not framed as an opportunity rather than a threat. With a question directed to the panellists, he asked how education and the arts (soft power) can challenge dominant anti-migration narratives, when visibility has been artificially increased to create a perception of larger problems than actually exist.

In photo: Dr Marcos Centeno-Martín (University of Valencia, Spain)

‘We should introduce migrant artists and artists from different nationalities, origins, social classes, genders, races, and so on in the national curriculum,’ Dr Rifà-Valls responded. She offered the example of a proposal developed by the Barcelona municipality to work with the Top Manta Collective of Sub-Saharan workers to produce clothing to sell. Eventually, this initiative enabled these Sub-Saharan migrants to create a new economy based on solidarity and cooperation. Similarly, Professor Howe mentioned that the data speaks for the acceptance of migrants, as it was proven that migration overwhelmingly benefits societies economically, socially, and culturally. ‘I think you need to look at the importance of migrant communities in reinvigorating social life in countries that, if you don’t continue evolving, you will stagnate. And I think that even super-aged and super-conservative societies like Korea are beginning to realise this,’ Professor Howe stated. He concluded by saying that it is important to educate society using some of these facts, but also to educate governments ‘to learn, to be educated, to evolve in response to not the migrant challenge,’ but the migrant opportunity. 

In photo: Professor Anne Boddington (IAFOR’s Provost)

In a closing statement, Professor Boddington offered a final provocation: ‘Who will listen to this, and who cares? Can we, with soft power, do anything about it? Is the answer a quick no? Or is it something where we can actually act? And does it matter?’ Professor Howe responded by placing the blame on those who should be promoting art and education, and their failure to do so in a way that shines the best light on immigration. ‘It’s not enough to say we’re going to continue putting on Hamlet, but we’re going to have actors from different ethnicities playing the roles. It’s not enough. All that’s doing is putting immigrants into other versions of us, instead of asking how immigration can make us better,’ he stated. His solution is to empower immigrants to be ‘their own best ambassadors’.

As writer and poet Gloria Montero put it during the Q&A session, ‘these questions that the panel brought up are terribly important to us as humans. We now live in a society that really only sees power, how to grow, get better, and get more money. We’re really losing and suffering, each one of us’. It is very important to keep asking these questions and to try to change popular narratives of conflict, despite the feeling of helplessness. 

Watch the full panel discussion in the video below.

Banner image: AM, Unsplash