Glossary
Plain-language definitions for terms you'll encounter in geopolitics and international economics.
SWIFT
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — a messaging network used by banks to send payment instructions to each other. SWIFT does not move money itself; it transmits the messages that authorize money movement between banks.
Soft power
The ability to get other countries to want what you want, without paying them or threatening them. The pull comes from your culture, your institutions, and your foreign policy. Joseph Nye introduced the term in *Bound to Lead* (1990) and elaborated it in *Soft Power* (2004), arguing that the United States enjoyed a structural advantage because its universities, films, philanthropies, and political ideals had global reach. The framework had its high water mark in the 1990s and early 2000s. The 2020s have eaten the concept on three fronts: the Iraq war and its aftermath drained the legitimacy account; social-media fragmentation broke the unitary cultural signal Hollywood and American universities once carried; and rising powers — China's Confucius Institutes, Gulf state-funded universities, India's diaspora-based outreach — built their own soft-power infrastructure. Nye's later work concedes that hard and soft power are entangled in 'smart power', and that soft power without hard-power credibility behind it tends to evaporate when tested. The G7-G20 institutional-coordination analyses on this site treat soft power as one input among several, not the master variable the 1990s framing claimed.
Sovereign immunity
The doctrine in international law that a sovereign state cannot be sued in another state's courts without its consent. Modern practice distinguishes 'absolute' sovereign immunity (no suits permitted) from the 'restrictive' doctrine that most states now follow, under which commercial activity by states is subject to ordinary jurisdiction but sovereign acts (military, diplomatic, regulatory) are not. The US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 codifies the restrictive approach. Sovereign immunity is the legal architecture behind the practical fact that defaulting sovereigns cannot be forced to pay by court order alone — restructuring requires creditor coordination rather than judicial enforcement.
Strategic ambiguity
A deliberate policy of leaving unclear whether and how a state would respond to a specific event — most famously US policy on whether it would defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. The aim is to deter both attack (by leaving threat plausible) and adventurism (by leaving support uncertain).