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It is undeniable that museums possess soft-power resources in abundance. By harnessing their existing soft-power resources and embracing their latent influence on the international system, museums have the potential to be powerful agents of change, using their unique strengths and comparative advantage to address the most daunting global challenges.

Yet museum practice traditionally has been regarded as ulterior or tangential to the formal realm of international relations. As stewards of culture, museums have potential to broker in international soft power, working alongside or in partnership with institutions and governments to influence broad-based, positive change. Culture both high and low reflects a society’s meaning and signals its values, which together with its practices and policies comprise its core soft-power resources (Nye 2008, pp. Nye, importantly, spoke to an alternative, or ‘soft,’ form of power that lies in attracting others willingly to your position by fostering in them empathy or envy, self-identification or aspiration.

At its most basic, power represents ‘the ability to do things and control others, to get others to do what they otherwise would not.’ So wrote Joseph Nye in his foundational study on the shifting contours of American power at the end of the cold war (Nye 1990: 154).

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