Global Power, Chicago-Style: What Comes Next

About This Event

In 1990, Joseph Nye coined a term for a tool of power that nations and their leaders knew and operationalized but did not deliberately name. Soft power is the ability to shape the world not through coercion but through attraction. Culture, values, and institutions do what armies cannot; they influence people. This year, our Global Power, Chicago-Style series set out to explore how this concept plays out at the subnational level, from our own city to the rest of the world, and to experience it firsthand rather than just discuss it.

We toured Francisco Gonzalez Pulido's atelier and heard from Sarah Herda, Co-Chair of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, seeing how design and architecture become a form of civic identity and export. We took an improv workshop at Second City, putting ourselves inside one of Chicago's most recognizable cultural institutions rather than just talking about it. And we learned how the World Marathon Majors concept came to be, tracing how a road race turned Chicago into a fixture in the world of elite runners.

Now it's time to look ahead. Join us for a facilitated conversation that closes the series by asking what comes next. Each of these events showed us a different way Chicago builds influence without force. This conversation will pull those threads together to ask what a future Chicago soft power could look like, and what role institutions like the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and networks like our own Young Professionals, should play in building it.