The ability to co-opt, persuade and attract others to assist in one’s goals is a desirable trait. States now do so through video games.

John is a 19-year-old living in Illinois, USA. John studies computer science at a local university but in his free time he’s an avid console gamer. His gaming console of choice is the Nintendo Switch. Every single day he comes back home from his university lectures to find himself in front of his Switch, this is his escape from the real world and primary recreation. Apart from games, he also loves watching anime. He finds the distinct animation and storytelling style of Japanese anime better than any other media form. As a result of this indulgence in Nintendo games and anime, John is quite involved in Japanese pop culture and holds the country in high regard with an aim to relocate there some day. John’s grandfather was a World War 2 veteran. He spent his entire life holding a grudge against the Japanese, and he blamed them for the horrors he had witnessed. He finds John’s indulgence perverted and horrifying. The thought of his own grandson indulging and one day relocating with the ‘enemy’ repulses him to his core. 

The ability to co-opt, persuade and attract others to assist in one’s goals is a desirable trait. It is quite possibly the most desirable trait, as it, compared to other methods, is the most resource friendly. International relations views power projection in two main domains, soft power and hard power. Hard power is the more violent and assertive of the two, as it employs military and economic methods to force others into subordination. Essentially; coercion. This also makes it quite a resource-intensive method of power projection as compared to soft power.  

Soft power relies on social and cultural methods of persuasion. The nature of this also makes it more of a long-term strategy that takes decades of work. In recent years, various scholars have been eager to point out how certain forms of media are subtly injected with a narrative. This narrative is often one that paints a state’s enemies in a bad light while showcasing the good nature of the state itself. A common target of this analysis are the James Bond movies, and almost every other Hollywood action movie. 

The efficacy of this method is hard to determine as it is not the sole factor at play, however, the subtlety of its narrative building makes for impeccable propaganda. 

Consider how in almost every other disaster or apocalyptic movie, it is the United States that figures out a way to save the world. An alien invasion? The US will save the world by defeating them. A zombie pandemic? The US will figure out a way to stop the spread, no matter how ironic that might be, considering their handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not to mention the fact that the US government and Hollywood have had close cooperation on varying topics in the past. You can read more about this topic 

This is where video games come into play. Going back to John from Illinois, this is nothing but Japanese video game soft power. Of course, Anime and the Japanese anime industry are also big factors, but people often skip over the importance of the video game industry in matters of soft power. 

Japan’s history is one filled with imperialism, war crimes, genocides like the Nanjing massacre and other atrocities that send a shiver down one's spine. In the past 60 or so years however, Japan has been able to rewrite its image in the minds of people by employing soft power. This is perhaps the country's greatest foreign policy accomplishment. 

 The video game industry is now bigger than the entire music and movie industry combined. Estimates claim that almost 3.24 billion people in the world regularly indulge in this recreational activity, while the movie industry shrinks due to the boom in OTT platforms.  

The most interesting aspect of this however is that globally, there’s a level playing field for all countries in the video game industry. China with Tencent, Japan with Nintendo and a varying number of big names in the US. There are numerous companies in the video game industry that dominate their respective regions. Tencent, a Chinese company, is the largest video games publisher in the world. It owns stakes in some big names like Riot Games, Supercell, Epic Games, Turtle Rock, Garena, Activision Blizzard and many more, with some being 100% or majority owned by Tencent. This does wonders for Chinese soft power projection, a good example of this is the Blitzchung controversy. 

In 2019, Blitzchung, an Esports player of the video game Hearthstone expressed his support for the Hong Kong protests of the same year. Being from Hong Kong, he sympathized with the cause and wore a mask commonly worn by the protesters and said “Liberate Hong Kong” during an official stream by Activision Blizzard, the company behind Hearthstone. Tencent owns a stake in Activision Blizzard. The retaliation of this online protest earned the player a yearlong ban from the Esports Tournament that the streaming event was for and a forfeit of all prize money. For some odd reason, the two livestream presenters who were interviewing Blitzchung were also terminated.  

The following community wide protests ended up with the ban being lowered to 6 months for both Blitzchung and the presenters and his winnings were reinstated. This however did not stop the unrest, with hashtag #boycottblizzard trending on twitter for weeks afterwards. 

What is truly intriguing here is that Tencent owns a measly 5% of Activision Blizzard. Furthermore, Tencent and the Chinese government were likely unaware of this event in the first place. It’s speculated that Activision Blizzard was acting on its own accord here, and that it chose to protect Chinese sentiments regardless of whether it was asked to or not. This is indicative of video games being an integral part of Chinese soft power. 

Going back to the level playing field, it makes complete sense why a country like China or Japan for that matter would indulge heavily in the video game industry. The profits are one big reason, but a smaller yet useful resource is that this is one of the only few domains in the sphere of soft power that is not overshadowed by the United States. Hollywood has long dominated the movie industry and Chinese media is unable to escape its own online ecosystem easily. This gives other countries an opportunity to gain an edge against the superpower as other domains are highly asymmetric for them.  

Video games are also effective domestic propaganda. Take the United States for example. The U.S. Army Esports is an official sponsored competitive gaming team of the U.S. Army. It is part of a public outreach program by the Army marketing and engagement team. The U.S. army uses video games as a recruitment tool, and this is not news. It has been doing so since 2002 with its own first-person shooter game ‘America’s Army’.  

Since then, this recruitment strategy has evolved. The U.S. Army Esports is involved in games like Call of Duty, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, etc. Mostly first-person shooter games that simulate military warfare to some extent. Their goal is to recruit young gamers who have a fascination for the military and indulge in these games by offering them the opportunity to do all of it in the real world. Disregarding the moral and ethical considerations of that, the U.S. army has only increased its involvement in video games and esports as a recruitment drive.  

To conclude, video games are often an ignored aspect of soft power projection. The utility they possess, however, is not ruled by this ignorance. The global south has been quick to harness their capabilities while the global north seems to have lost some footing in the domain in the past decade. Regardless of the contemporary realities, video games will only grow as an industry and become vital aspects of soft power diplomacy. The ability to rebuild a nation’s image in the cosmically small amount of time of one generation is a greatly beneficial power that every nation state would love to possess.  

The Soft Power Projection of Video Games 

The United Nations Security Council or the UNSC is an organ of the United Nations that consists of 15 members with 10 non-permanent member states and 5 permanent mem

The United Nations Security Council or the UNSC is an organ of the United Nations that consists of 15 members with 10 non-permanent member states and 5 permanent member states. The primary purpose and focus of the UNSC is to ensure that international peace and security is maintained. This includes passing resolutions on regional conflicts, domestic political issues, acts of aggression, etc to sanctioning people, companies and states that have threatened international peace and security. Sanctions are done to peacefully put pressure on the receiving party to comply with the goals that have been set by the committee. It is a vital tool for the UNSC. The UNSC also provides the 5 permanent member states with veto power. This allows these 5 states i.e., Russia, People’s Republic of China, United States of America, France and the United Kingdom, the authority to veto any substantive matter that is on the committee agenda. This gains even more importance when we learn that the UNSC is also responsible for endorsing the admission of new members to the UN and approving any changes made to the UN charter, including the UNSC itself. This creates an almost paradoxical arrangement that allows the permanent states in the UNSC to absolve themselves of acts that threaten international peace and security as they determine what is constituted as such an act in the first place. The veto also allows them to block the reformation of this power as well, hence the paradoxical arrangement that is exploitable without repercussions. 

Defined simply, democracy is the rule of the people. It gives the majority of the power to the people wherein they can exercise this power through a voting system. The citizens can vote for the representative of their liking through a free election that elects leaders for a particular period. The process repeats at the end of the aforementioned period. The most common kind of democracy today is a representative democracy. Democracy in the contemporary world has largely been considered a peaceful state solution. This is owed to the democratic peace theory which proclaims that a democratic state is less likely to engage in warfare with another democratic state. The reasonings behind this are plenty, from pacifist themes around negotiations between two democratic states to the internal system of checks and balances and accountability of the leader to the citizens of the state. Within the context of the UN, Democracy is a supporting pillar of the very nature of the UN. The UN in its 77 years of existence has been the biggest promoter of democracy in the world, more so than any other state or multinational organization. This showcases a very clear contrast between the values that the UN works to spread, and values embedded in arguably its most vital organ; the UNSC.  

Evidence of the United Nations Security Council's Inherent Un-Democracy  

In 1963 the general assembly recommended an amendment to the UN charter to increase the memberships in the security council. The change increased the members from 11 to 15 and the affirmative votes needed from 7 to 9. This change also set a basis for the geographical representation of the non-permanent seats in the security council. This is as follows: 5 from African and Asian states, 1 from Eastern European states, 2 from Latin American states and 2 from Western European and other states.  

This system does provide somewhat accurate geographical representation of the regions of the world, but as it is only limited to the non-permanent members, it fails to address the uneven distribution of power in the UNSC as a whole. Most of the power resides with the permanent members thanks to the veto factor.  

Originally, the veto power was given to the P5 as a way of acknowledging them as the remaining great powers of the world after the second world war. However, in the contemporary world it's reasonable to say that some of the P5 members are no longer meeting that criterion. The United Kingdom and France have long lost their great power status, but they continue to enjoy the perks of an outdated system that grants them indiscriminate power. Although these two states have not used their veto power since 1989, the very possibility of it being used can leave some issues unaddressed. Not to mention the overall irrelevance of France and the UK when it comes to international security matters, they simply aren’t the military superpowers they were, nor do they carry the level of influence some non-permanent members do. Whether Russia is still worthy of that status remains up in the air considering the current Russo-Ukraine war. This system in and of itself is undemocratic in nature, it is the equivalent of giving a reanimated Abraham Lincoln the nuclear football and expecting him to be responsible with it. There is no solid argument that can showcase why these states still deserve this position of power. Reforms to expand the UNSC permanent membership or to change the states enjoying it, has met varying degrees of scrutiny. The US, Russia and China have denied most of these potential reforms, mostly to cater to their own national interests.  

The very existence of the veto power limits the issues that are brought up in the UNSC. As the threat of the veto leads to changes in how a draft resolution can be formed. A good example of this is most of the cold war conflicts, which were simply unaddressed by the UNSC.  

The 2022 Russo-Ukraine war is another area of veto power abuse, wherein Russia has vetoed several draft resolutions that sought to condemn Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory.  

To add onto the already damning case against the UNSC, the committee has a transparency issue. The UNSC has the ability to hold ‘closed-door’ meetings. This allows the UNSC to withhold information about any deliberations happening during the session. In recent years this practice has become somewhat unpopular but still sees use depending on the topic at hand. For instance, back in 2019 when India removed the special status it provided to J&K, China who is a close ally to Pakistan requested for closed consultations on the topic. Pakistan and India were not a part of this deliberation as neither had non-permanent membership of the UNSC at the time. It’s said that this session was simply one for “getting familiar” with the current situation in J&K and the decline of diplomatic ties between India and Pakistan after Article 370 was invoked. Closed door meetings are informal, so there are no formal proceedings or procedures to be followed.  

Another area of lack of transparency is with the Secretariat’s reporting and the sanctions committees. The UNSC relies on the reports from the Secretariat, but these reports are not always made open to the public. The sanctions committee oversees the employment of sanctions as a tool to ensure international peace and security but this committee functions behind closed doors as well. The staggering contrast between the transparency of the other committees of the UN like the UNHRC, UNDP, UNODA, etc. as compared to the UNSC is shameful.  

One can argue that a certain amount of confidentiality is required to maintain socio-political harmony depending on the topic at hand, or to simply limit the amount of classified information available openly to the public. But it still does not address the lack of acknowledgment by the P5 on the subject. If the lack of transparency was being maintained for these very reasons and not for the shared national interests of those 5 states, they would have stated as such to further their soft power and sidestep controversy.  

United Nations Security Council Reforms 

Reforms to the UNSC have been a topic of deliberation at the UNGA since 1992. Since which a subsidiary organ of the General Assembly has been established to consider every dimension of the campaign to alter the structure of the UNSC. As mentioned earlier, the UNSC has command over itself in how it is structured, which provides it with a certain level of immunity against outside demands. This can be seen in Article 108 of the UN Charter which speaks on how the charter can be amended. According to it, a general assembly decision can alter the charter if it is approved by two thirds of the GA members and ratified by two thirds of the member states including the permanent members of the security council. This requirement for all 5 permanent members to have ratified the decision makes it extremely difficult and unlikely for any UNSC reform to take place. No state when given that level of power and influence over other states, would be willing to give that power away. One recommendation for reform is restructuring the UNSC to add more permanent members, this is the more likely of the unlikely wherein the current permanent member states maintain their power status but contemporary powers that have originated since the second world war are added to the roster. The states with a popular ‘P5+1’ campaign include; Japan, India, Germany, and Brazil. This has complications of its own as most of the P5 states are unwilling to share that power with one or more of these candidates due to their own colliding interests with one or more of these states. China is against India (but supports its bid if India takes back its support for Japanese membership) and Japan. Brazil’s bid is supported by 4 members, but the US supports it without a veto power being given to the state. Germany’ campaign is supported by France, UK, and Russia but the other 2 states have largely been quiet on the issue.  

The contemporary world is seeing a drastic number of changes, from the world order being in flux to European peace being disrupted by Russia’s aggression. The economic entanglements of the post-pandemic era continue to be irregular and create areas of crisis that need to be addressed by the current international powers of the world, not remnant powers of a conflict that happened a lifetime ago. The time is different and rapidly changing, the systems we work under, especially a system in charge of something so fragile and important, also needs to adapt to the times. The only way forward is to reform the UNSC to make it more democratic or dismantle it and abolish it altogether before it implodes on itself.  

The Soft Power Projection of Video Games

The United Nations Security Council is Inherently Undemocratic