Comment: Power. (1998, 20 Marks)
Power is the organising concept of international relations and its most contested one. Robert A. Dahl‘s classic formula, “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do”, makes it a relationship rather than a possession. Every school must say what power is and how it works before it can explain anything else.
Meanings and properties
- Realist core: for Hans J. Morgenthau (Politics Among Nations, 1948), power is “man’s control over the minds and actions of other men” and “always the immediate aim” of states. Kenneth N. Waltz recast it as the distribution of capabilities that defines a system’s structure: unipolar, bipolar or multipolar.
- Three properties: power is relational (over someone), relative (against a rival) and contextual (aircraft carriers are useless in a currency crisis). Capability therefore does not guarantee outcome: witness the US in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
- A ladder of forms: influence, coercion, force and authority differ in mechanism and cost. Authority is the cheapest, since compliance is voluntary, which is why hegemons seek legitimacy.
Types and faces
| Lens | Power as | Illustration |
|---|---|---|
| Hard power | Coercion through force and payment | Sanctions, tariffs, military deployment |
| Soft power (Joseph S. Nye) | Attraction through culture, values and policy | Yoga diplomacy, the diaspora, Bollywood |
| Smart power | Hard and soft combined by design | Alliances alongside development aid |
| Structural power (Susan Strange) | Setting the frameworks of security, production, finance and knowledge | Dollar clearing, technical standards |
| Three faces (Dahl; Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz; Steven Lukes) | Winning decisions; keeping issues off the agenda; shaping what others want | UNGA votes; the anticipated Security Council veto; policy orthodoxy |
Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (2005) integrate these into compulsory, institutional, structural and productive power. Each school sees one cell; all four operate at once.
Perspectives in dialogue
- Liberals (Robert O. Keohane) treat power as partly variable-sum: institutions and interdependence let gains grow for all.
- Constructivists (Alexander Wendt) show that power depends on meaning. Labels such as “responsible nuclear power” or “rogue state” distribute rights before any bargaining begins.
- Gramscian scholars (Robert W. Cox) see durable power as hegemony, in Antonio Gramsci’s sense of consent protected by the armour of coercion.
- Feminists (J. Ann Tickner) contrast power-over with power-with, a capacity for mutual enablement.
- Kautilya‘s saptanga treated power as an interdependent system of ruler, ministers, territory, fort, treasury, army and allies.
Contemporary shifts
- Transition and diffusion: power is moving among states, from the Atlantic towards Asia, and away from states towards firms and networks. Amitav Acharya (The End of American World Order, 2014) calls the result a multiplex world of many actors and orders, not a new hegemony.
- Weaponised interdependence: Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman show that hubs become chokepoints. China’s October 2025 rare-earth controls, suspended under a truce now extended to January 2027, and US chip controls are examples; each use spurs diversification that erodes the leverage.
- India: third in the 2025 Lowy Asia Power Index (40.0), with the world’s fifth-largest military budget ($92.1bn in 2025, SIPRI), yet limited in shaping outcomes even in its neighbourhood. Its multi-alignment across the Quad, BRICS and the SCO seeks structural leverage, not victory in any single bargain.
Conclusion
Power is not a stock of assets but a relationship within a context, exercised through coercion, attraction, institutions and meaning at once. Realism captures its irreducible core and the critical schools capture its hidden faces. The most complete exercise of power is often the one that leaves no visible trace.