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Their account of soft power in Guinea (and West Africa more widely) sug-
gested that influential individuals - influential because of the institutional
positions they occupy - can, as a group, deceive themselves unwittingly.
Fairhead and Leach's conviction, it seems to me, was that it's possible to
speak truth to power. By gathering new or overlooked evidence, they sought
to refine an, only partly, accurate representation of forests. While 'false'
representations might prove efficacious, Fairhead and Leach believed that
more 'truthful' ones would (or should) win any epistemological battle. Their
research was, in effect, a plea for more accurate representations based on bet-
ter evidence and sensitive to geographical differences within and between
nation states.
In light of the discussion of social power early in this chapter, we might
want to question these epistemic workers' self-representation. Their depic-
tion of the history and effects of soft power in Kissidougou was intended
to exert a soft power of its own, using the rhetoric of 'truth versus fal-
sity' as a tool of persuasion. Or, if you prefer, it employed this rhetoric
to challenge and resist soft power on behalf of all those West African land
users whose voices went unheard for so many years. It was a political inter-
vention, one designed to alter a reality it was ostensibly examining in a
'reasoned and objective' fashion. Accordingly, my summary of Fairhead and
Leach's research in the previous pages should be viewed in the same way.
I'm not suggesting that their exposé of the false, but consequential, repre-
sentations upon which soft power was built in Guinea spoke the language
of unadulterated truth and is to be trusted by you the reader. Instead, I'm
arguing that their representation of trees, both 'natural' and anthropogenic,
was intended to empower those disempowered by deforestation discourse,
and to make the authors of this discourse aware of its limitations. Fairhead
and Leach's normative stance was that local land users should have the
opportunity - even, perhaps, the right - to shape the ways in which their
livelihoods and environments were (are) depicted by authoritative actors.
They were not, it seems to me, arguing against state-led forest management.
Their point, instead, was that 'power to' was operating on a flawed epis-
temic basis and was thus being misapplied. We should therefore treat with
'positive scepticism' their claim to correctly represent what others had long
'mis-represented'. As I said earlier in this chapter, exposés of social power
can themselves be seen as power plays.
SUMMARY
In the previous pages, I've focussed on soft social power, namely power that
depends not on force or violence but on the production and deployment of
information and knowledge. I've explored the principal issues and fault lines
that have preoccupied analysts of social power in the social sciences and
humanities in recent years. I suggested that these analysts' representations
are plural - there's no consensus on what, precisely, social power is, who
 
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