Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8882-1326

Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Interdisciplinary

Abstract

This article examines the motivations and dynamics of the donors and suppliers of the covid-19 vaccines to the global south countries in the context of public diplomacy to wield soft power. Thus, it investigates how the West and East use the vaccines as a public diplomacy tool to influence public opinion in other nations or continents in order to either enhance their global image and reputation or exert some form of international influence or have new allies. The article argues that covid-19 vaccines are a soft power asset; therefore, the manufacturing nations may use them to shape their target foreign publics opinion, maintain allies, and win enemies globally. The big players have used vaccines over the years to achieve foreign policy objectives in the history of international relations. As the article's findings indicate, soft power has been the implicit primary goal of supplying vaccine countries to the less-developed states. The article employs public diplomacy and soft power concepts as the theoretical frameworks underpinning the work. The literature on vaccine diplomacy is very scarce to the best of my knowledge in public diplomacy. Scholars have not given much attention in the field of this scarcity; hence, this article seeks to fill the gap. The paper concludes that human life must precede before political and selfish national interests in pandemic matters and suggests future research in other health diplomacy areas as a significant soft power resource through public diplomacy campaigns.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/19wd-5t51

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