Mapping Multipolarity: Soft and Hard Power in the Digital Age

This paper explores the dynamics of soft and hard power within a multipolar world, focusing on how digital platforms serve as arenas for geopolitical narrative shaping. Using a hashtag co-occurrence network analysis on TikTok, we investigate how actors, particularly powers like Russia which emphasize sovereignty and civilizational plurality, use social media to advance the concept of a multipolar world and offer alternatives to Western-centric frameworks. By tracking the use of hashtags such as #multipolarworld and #multipolarworldRU, we analyze how digital narratives aligned with soft power strategies contribute to the legitimation of alternative models of international governance and global cooperation. A network analysis of message forwarding within the Telegram group Eurasia&Multipolarity adds a complementary layer of insight, revealing how strategic narratives emerging from sovereign state actors are disseminated through decentralized digital networks.To contextualize this digital discourse historically and geopolitically, we first integrate academic perspectives by analyzing the occurrence and co-occurrence of the terms “multipolar world” and “multipolarity” within the International Relations and Political Science literature using Web of Science data. This allows for a comparison between formal scholarly frameworks and the real-time, grassroots discussions on platforms like TikTok and Telegram. Complementing this, we employ Google Ngrams to examine the global and multilingual usage of these terms over time, offering insight into their semantic evolution across diverse cultural and political contexts.Through this multi-disciplinary approach, the study bridges theoretical discussions of power with empirical data from digital platforms, providing a nuanced analysis of how both liberal democracies and sovereignty-oriented states construct and propagate narratives of power in a rapidly evolving global order.