Bangladesh’s Untapped Currency: The Case for Soft Power Diplomacy

Bangladesh spends a great deal of energy worrying about what it lacks: a blue-water navy, deep capital reserves, a seat at the table when Washington, Beijing and New Delhi discuss the Bay of Bengal. It spends far less energy on the leverage it already has. Sandwiched between three great powers with competing interests in its stability, Bangladesh has convinced itself that strategic weight comes only from hard capabilities. It is time to take soft power just as seriously.

The term, coined by Joseph Nye, describes the ability to get others to want what you want, not through coercion or payment but through the attractiveness of your example and ideas. For a small or middle power wedged inside a great-power triangle, this is not a luxury add-on to foreign policy; it is often the only instrument available that does not require choosing a side. Hard power invites alignment; soft power invites goodwill, and goodwill, accumulated patiently, becomes leverage of its own.

Bangladesh already possesses more of this currency than it credits itself with. Its record in United Nations peacekeeping is one of the largest and longest-standing in the world, a quiet form of diplomacy that has built trust across dozens of countries with no strategic reason to think of Dhaka at all. Its chairmanship of the Climate Vulnerable Forum has turned an unwanted vulnerability, acute exposure to sea-level rise and extreme weather, into genuine standing at multilateral climate negotiations, where Bangladesh speaks with earned authority rather than as a supplicant. Its founding foreign policy pledge, friendship to all, malice towards none, was not merely rhetoric; it is a brand, and brands are exactly what soft power is built from.

The trouble is that Bangladesh treats these assets as background colour rather than active instruments. Peacekeeping is managed by the armed forces as a professional undertaking, rarely leveraged diplomatically beyond the fact of participation. The Climate Vulnerable Forum chairmanship generates headlines during COP summits and little sustained follow-through between them. There is no coordinated effort to convert humanitarian credibility, cultural reach or diaspora goodwill into an instrument of statecraft, the way Singapore has turned administrative excellence into a brand or South Korea has turned popular culture into geopolitical currency.

Nowhere is this underuse clearer than with the diaspora, roughly ten million Bangladeshis abroad, valued by the state almost exclusively as a source of remittances. That is real money, but a narrow reading of what an overseas population can offer. India built the “Pravasi Bharatiya” architecture around its diaspora decades ago, treating expatriate professionals and lobbying groups in Washington and London as an extension of its own foreign policy; the Philippines, a labour-exporting country closer to Bangladesh's own profile, has done something similar. Bangladesh’s diaspora includes professionals, academics and second-generation voters in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Gulf with no organised channel to advocate for Dhaka's interests, correct misperceptions, or open doors formal diplomacy cannot. Treating this population as a lobbying and cultural-diplomacy asset, not only a wage-transfer mechanism, would cost little and could pay real dividends. This matters because Bangladesh’s structural position leaves little room for hard-power signalling. Its security relationship with India is defined by an asymmetry no defence budget will erase. Its economic weight relative to China is modest. Its market matters to the United States, but market access is transactional, not an attachment. In a triangle this lopsided, soft power is one of the few registers in which Bangladesh can compete, because it does not require matching anyone’s budget or fleet.

There is also a domestic argument for taking soft power seriously, and it is less comfortable. Soft power cannot be manufactured by messaging alone; it must be backed by the credibility of the institutions doing the talking. A country cannot present itself as a global voice on climate justice while its coastal governance remains under-resourced, or brand itself a peacekeeping nation while its foreign-service coordination lacks a coherent doctrine. Soft power, in other words, is domestic reform, viewed from the outside.

What would this look like in practice? First, Bangladesh needs a body, inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or a dedicated public diplomacy unit, tasked with converting existing assets, peacekeeping, climate leadership, cultural diplomacy, into coordinated messaging rather than leaving each ministry to advertise its own achievements in isolation. Second, the diaspora architecture described above needs an institutional home: a standing diaspora-engagement office empowered to organise advocacy networks abroad rather than today’s ad hoc consular outreach. Third, climate leadership needs to be sustained between summits, backed by domestic investment that makes the international claim credible. Fourth, cultural and educational diplomacy, scholarships, language centres, academic exchange, remains almost entirely undeveloped, even though it is among the cheapest and most durable forms of influence a country can build. None of this requires Bangladesh to choose between Washington, Beijing and New Delhi, which is precisely the point. Soft power appeals to a state hedging between great powers for the same reason it appeals to any smaller actor facing larger ones: it does not force a decision hard power inevitably does. A stronger Climate Vulnerable Forum platform does not offend India. A more visible peacekeeping brand does not alarm China. A serious diaspora strategy does not provoke Washington. These are, almost uniquely among Bangladesh's instruments, forms of leverage built without anyone objecting to their being built.

The great-power competition unfolding around the Bay of Bengal will not slow down for Bangladesh to decide how seriously it wants to take its own reputation. But reputation, unlike a naval fleet or a foreign-exchange reserve, is an asset Bangladesh can start building immediately, at low cost, without asking anyone’s permission. The only real obstacle is the habit of treating soft power as a footnote to foreign policy rather than one of its central instruments. That habit, more than any external constraint, is genuinely within Dhaka's power to change.