The concept of soft power, as introduced by Joseph S. Nye in the early 1990s has become popular in academia and media since the end of the Cold War. It addresses the influence of attraction through culture, policies, and values—as in “getting others to want what you want” and as distinct from hard power through coercion by means of economic strength and/or military force. As such, the concept reflects the growing significance of immaterial factors for exercising power under conditions of globalization, financialization, and mediatization, when physical control of territory, trade, and transport is increasingly supplanted by the significance of controlling digital infrastructures, ideational languages, and norm systems, allowing nonstate actors more influence, diffusing the power of the state and affecting coupled human–environment systems in diverse ways. While soft power has sometimes been reduced to imply an idealist outlook on global affairs, its main contribution lies in nuancing the concept of power in international relations, illustrating the significance of the whole spectrum of power, ranging from coercive hard power to attractive soft power. As such, it’s usage in human geography and other social sciences also requires attention to the complexity of the concept as introduced by Nye to avoid the risk of reproducing the binary separation between nature and humanity, material and immaterial factors implied by the dichotomy between hard and soft forms of power.