Iran’s soft power in Venezuela

Abstract

This article explores Iran’s soft power strategies in Venezuela in the past two decades. It first reviews the definition of soft power in the literature, followed by Iran’s overall soft power strategy. Then, the article addresses the broader relationship between Iran and Venezuela since 2001. The reasons why the Tehran–Caracas relationship has significantly strengthened during the past two decades will also be analysed in this section. Drawing on a rich array of primary source material in Persian, the main section of the article explores Tehran’s exercise of soft power in Venezuela in four spheres: education, culture, religion/ideology and social services. The article demonstrates that despite certain shortcomings arising from the significant distance and religious and cultural differences between Iran and Venezuela, Tehran has made a significant investment in resources that promote its soft power in Venezuela. This helps Iran to prolong and maximise its influence in a country located in an area that is traditionally considered to be the United States’ backyard.

Keywords:

• Iran
• soft power
• Latin America
• Venezuela

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 With regard to the latter, one can refer to the discourse on the dialogue among civilisations presented by former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami (see Wastnidge 2015).

2 These activities are also reported by anti-regime Iranian websites; see Radio Farda (2020a).

3 The condemnation of Soleimani’s assassination was not limited to Venezuela. For example, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro, following the assassination of General Soleimani, wrote on his Twitter account that ‘Soleimani was the architect of the defeat of the fascist fundamentalists of ISIL in Iraq, but the United States responded to these attempts by assassinating him’ (cited in Nournews 2022).

4 See Radio Farda (2020b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ali Akbar

Dr Ali Akbar, PhD, is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Melbourne, where he received his PhD in Islamic studies. He is also a casual research fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. He is an expert in the fields of Islamic studies and Middle East politics as well as Iranian history and politics. He is the author of Contemporary Perspectives on Revelation and Qur’anic Hermeneutics (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Contemporary Approaches to the Qur’an and Its Interpretation in Iran (co-authored with Abdullah Saeed, Routledge, 2020). He has also published extensively in journals including Iranian Studies, British Journal of Middle East Studies, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Culture and Religion, Mediterranean Politics, and Political Theology.