Education as a Soft Power in Modern Foreign and Russian Politological Research

In the modern world education plays an important role traditionally acting as an institution of knowledge transfer. At the same time, under the conditions of the multipolar world the role of education has considerably expanded. It is ingrained in the foreign policy arsenal of a number of states, being the integral part and form of their foreign policy strategy. The paper deals with the approaches of a number of Russian and foreign political scientists to the problem of qualifying education as one of the tools of the soft power policy. This topic doesn’t yet occupy the sufficient place in domestic politological research that is conditioned by the fact that Russia has adopted the concept of soft power as a true instrument of political influence in the international field with some delay. Speaking about the geography of the research, it should be noted that western authors take interest in various regions of the world and, first of all, in the most actively developing states such as, for example, China. As for Russian works, in most cases they are devoted either to the analysis of the domestic experience of implementing the policy of soft power with the use of the resource of education, or to the European policy in the context of the participation of the Russian Federation in Bologna Process. All these fact allow for concluding that the problem under consideration demands further studying and conceptualization.