The meanings of power and the theoretical domains of power analysis.

Stefano Guzzini

(Alternative title: ‘The power analysis of power politics and the power politics of

power analysis’)

forthcoming in Felix Berenskoetter, ed., Concepts in World Politics (London et al.:

Sage).

This chapter picks up the concept of power, perhaps the most important concept

for analysts of world politics, to advance three ways in which we can analyze

concepts. Rather than offering a survey of different conceptualizations of power,

which have been well discussed elsewhere (Baldwin, 1989, 2002; Barnett and

Duvall, 2005; Berenskoetter, 2007; Guzzini, 1993, 2000; for a succinct overview,

see Guzzini, 2011), the chapter shows the crucial importance of conceptual

analysis both for the critique and development of theory and as an empirical

analysis of the performance nature of power analysis. In doing so, the discussion

points to the analytical benefits and limits of taking a concept’s theoretical and

political contexts seriously.

The chapter proceeds in three parts. The first section will tackle how to

understand or define a concept. Far from being a purely semantic exercise or a

simple instrumental step in the operationalization of variables, I look at concepts

from their context-specific usage, including our theoretical languages. Applied to

the concept of power, I look at how the two overarching domains of power

1
analysis, political theory and explanatory theory, can help us map the different

concepts of the power family. The main purpose of this section is to justify my non-

instrumental assumptions in conceptual analysis: analyzing the concept of power

is more than defining it; and some definitions may seriously hinder analyzing it.

The second section looks at the role the concept of power plays in our theoretical

languages and shows how conceptual analysis can be used for the analysis and

critique of theories. It illustrates how the ‘scientific approach’ to concept analysis

(Berenskoetter, intro) can be adapted for critical purposes. It does so by

addressing a paradox. On the one hand, concepts derive their specific meaning

from the theoretical and meta-theoretical context in which they are embedded. On

the other hand, meanings travel across the multitude of theoretical contexts. This

can produce situations in which a concept considered central is, however, not best

served by keeping it within the theoretical context in which it is predominantly

applied. Also, importing conceptualizations from other theoretical contexts may

not work because it produces contradictions within receiving theoretical contexts.

Applied to the concept of power, I will use the mapping of power concepts of the

first section for a theoretical critique of realism, a theory that is often identified

with the analysis of power.

The third and final section focuses on the role of power in political discourse(s)

and shows how the concept of power becomes itself the object of empirical

analysis. This is a central issue for conceptual history in its different forms, but also

for performative analyses of discursive practices, and hence the ‘political (critical)

2
approach’ outlined in the introduction to this volume. . Power is performative in

that it mobilizes ideas of agency and responsibility. It politicizes issues, since

action and change are now deemed possible. Moreover, given that we have no

objective measure of power, but practitioners need to assume one to attribute

status and recognition, a part of international politics can be understood as the

ongoing negotiation about who has the right to define and what is part of the

definition of power. This struggle over the ‘right’ definition of power, as used by

practitioners, is part and parcel of power politics.

The meanings of power and the theoretical domains of power analysis

Concepts and theories are intrinsically connected. Not only do concepts appear as

the terms of our theoretical propositions, but concepts, such as power, play a role

in the constitutive function of theories in that they ‘conceive’ the very things we

theorize. ‘Concepts are about ontology. To develop a concept is more than

providing a definition: it is deciding what is important about an entity’ (Goertz,

2006: 27, original emphasis). In support of this stance and developing on the

theory dependence of concepts, I will argue against conceptual analyses that are

either ‘descriptive’ and theory-neutral, or instrumentalist, where any

conceptualization will do as long as it serves the explanatory purpose. In contrast, I

will look at the meaning(s) of power by analyzing their role within the contexts of

political and of explanatory theory.

Conceptual analysis as neither neutral nor instrumental

3
The attempt to find a neutral term is typical for more positivist understandings of

conceptual analysis. They are perfectly justifiable for some specific purposes and

contexts. It is easy to see how having several meanings of power impairs research

communication and accumulation. The ideal is to imitate the technical cleanness of

an almost mathematical language in which concepts are precisely defined and

distinguished. As typical for positivism, this technical language is not meant to

literally reflect the world, but should provide a tool with which we can more

efficiently study and deal with that world. In its most common version, such an

approach to conceptual analysis aims at reconstructing a ‘descriptive’ (Nagel,

1975), i.e., theoretically neutral, meaning of a concept(s), where concepts are

defined ‘independently of any theories with the purpose of clarifying whatever

isolated generalizations have been made or may be asserted’ (Oppenheim, 1981:

189). Conceptual analysis is but a crucial first step for variable construction and for

the transferability of analytical results.

This approach is useful, but only as far as it goes. Putting neutrality and

operationalization first can easily end up in a dilemma: faced with the difficulties of

pinning down a concept, scholars decide to go for its more neutral and easily

operationalizable aspects, but they thereby incur the risk of emptying the concept

of the very significance for which it had been chosen as a focus in the first place.

For instance, analysts of power in International Relations who start from a more

empirical grounding have often tried to express power either in mainly military

indicators (Mearsheimer, 2001) or some composite index usually including GDP

(Merrit and Zinnes, 1989). But this then neglects other resources and the

4
structural aspects of power so important to understanding domination in

international politics. In addition, the descriptive approach faces a second

problem. Here, the search for neutrality leads researchers to climb up the ‘ladder

of abstraction’ to such daring heights that these ‘overstretched’ concepts can no

longer function as data-containers viable for empirical analysis in the first place

(Sartori, 1970, 1984; see also Collier and Mahon, 1993).

Most importantly, perhaps, such neutrality may not be possible in the first place. It

assumes that all concepts can function independently of the theoretical and/or

meta-theoretical context in which they are commonly used. And precisely this does

not work, since it rests on a basic paradox. Faced with the absence of a general

social theory to build upon, Oppenheim had chosen a strategy of ‘neutral concepts’

as building blocks for such a theory, more inductive and more bottom-up. Yet the

very same reason for which underlying meta-theoretical and theoretical

differences thwart a general theory, they also thwart any theoretically significant

concept to stay neutral to start with. And this produces a paradox for Oppenheim’s

strategy: neutrality is sought for, because it is a step towards an encompassing

social theory; yet starting with neutrality is only possible if we already have one.

Hence, concept formation and theory formation stand in a mutually constitutive

relationship, and the philosophical and meta-theoretical assumptions which divide

our social and political theories are inevitably reflected in the meaning and

theoretical use of concepts. As a result, the meaning of these concepts is to be

approached from the theoretical contexts in which they are used. This does not

5
exclude translatability in general; but looking for translations is a different

enterprise to looking for a neutral meta-language.

In addition to opposing a neutral conceptualization of concepts, the following

analysis is also informed by a stance against instrumentalism in conceptual

analysis. This refers to the idea that any definition of a concept will do as long as it

is consistent with some usage and can be fruitfully fitted into an analysis. Such an

instrumental view, if qualified, has been proposed in a recent re-discovery of

Sartori (Collier and Gerring, 2009; see also the earlier writings of Gerring, 2001).

But this neglects the fact that (our core) concepts are a repository of our

accumulated knowledge. In a section entitled ‘the loss of historical anchorage’,

Sartori writes that “our understandings of meanings are not arbitrary stipulations

but reminders of historical experience and experimentation” and that those who

ignore how our political concepts were discussed in the past and how their

meaning evolved “have freed themselves not only from the constraints of

etymology, but equally from the learning process of history.” (Sartori, 2009 [1975]:

62, original italics). So, while any conceptualization is a construction of the

observer, we cannot just instrumentally define our terms as we feel best for

coding, with no concern for their historical legacies and wider purpose: we would

end up with a clean definition which remains blind to and does not reflect the

historical and political legacy that gave that particular concept its significance to

start with. Our concepts are living memory, and we must understand their

meaning as embedded in theoretical contexts and political history (Guzzini, 1993,

2005).

6
The domains of power in International Relations

Power has been ubiquitous in the discipline of International Relations since its

early days, when realism used it threefold to define the very nature of

international politics (‘power politics’), the main factor for explaining behaviour

(in terms of the ‘national interest’), and outcomes. The notion of power politics

provided a demarcation criterion for the study of politics as opposed to law, and

for the study of international as opposed to domestic politics. It did so by

characterizing a qualitatively different nature of politics at the international level

which is due to the absence of a world government, a state called ‘anarchy’ (see

chapter by Prichard). Not only did anarchy become a core concept for political

realism; it was seen as the basis for understanding the special nature (and hence

expertise) of international relations in general. By moving international, the nature

of politics is profoundly affected. Whereas in domestic politics, power can be used

synonymously with government, at least partly defined with regard to a common

good, no such commonality exists at the international level, where ‘powers’ meet

unfettered. Power is still about political order, but merely about the ‘art of the

possible’ in support of the ‘reason of state’ autonomy. And even scholars who may

not agree with political realism implicitly pay tribute to this view, as long as they

are wary about the ‘domestic analogy’ of transferring the understanding and

functioning of politics from the domestic to the international realm.

In addition to defining the nature of international politics, realists use power as the

central variable for explaining interests and outcomes. As in Morgenthau’s famous

7
statement, ‘whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always

the immediate aim’ (Morgenthau, 1948: 13). The accumulation of power is

necessary to protect a country from aggression and, if that happens, from defeat.

Moreover, under the assumption that countries will try to avoid any configuration

that could be detrimental to their survival, an international ‘balance of power’

ensues ‘of necessity’ (Morgenthau, 1948: 125). For realists, then, power refers to

two great theoretical domains: the political theory about the nature of order and

government and the explanatory theory of behavior and outcomes.

To come to grips with this dual heritage, I follow Morriss’ move to study concepts

from their usage in different contexts (Morriss, 2002 [1987]: chapter 6). Such

contexts may ask for different conceptualizations. For instance, in a practical

context one wants to know what others can do to oneself whether intended or not;

in a moral context that assesses responsibility, such non-intentional power may be

less relevant. The pertinence of certain conceptualizations is to be established

through the purposes within such contexts.1 Hence, by approaching power from

the perspective of its context-specific usage, it is possible to establish its different

conceptualizations in the two distinct yet intrinsically connected fields of political

theory and explanatory theory.2

1
Morriss excludes a scientific context for power, since power statements ‘summarise observations; they
do not explain them’ (Morriss, 2002 [1987]: 44, original emphasis). I approach that context differently,
however, by not subsuming it under causal explanatory theorizing, as Morriss does.
2
For a first exposition of this approach, see Guzzini (2007), later developed in Guzzini (2013,
Introduction). See also Haugaard (2010).

8
The purpose of power analysis in the field of political theory, as I understand it

here, is to think about the nature of the ‘polity’ in which questions of the

organization of (organized) violence and of the common good, as well as questions

of freedom, are paramount. Power here stands for ‘government’ or ‘governance’

and political order, as well as personal ‘autonomy’. The logic in the field of

explanatory theories is to conceive of power in terms of a (micro) theory of action

or a (macro) theory of domination. Here, power is searched for the explanation of

behaviour and the outcomes of social action. It is here that power is thought of in

terms of ‘agency’, ‘influence’, or prevalence, if not ‘cause’, but also, if used at the

collective level, in terms of social rule and hegemony. Crossing the two theoretical

domains with a focus on individual or structural aspects of power analysis gives

the following table.3

Political theory Explanatory

(domain of theory (domain
constitutive of applied
knowledge) knowledge)
Polity / Socio-political order
Macro Common Government / Governance Hierarchy
level good Rule / Domination / Hegemony Stratification
Micro Freedom Autonomy Ability/Capacity Disposition
level Responsibility Independence Influence Cause
Subjectivity Agency

Table 1. The domains and concepts of power (NB. Dark shading refers to primary power concepts; light
shading to centrally related terms). Source: Guzzini (2013: 10).

3
For graphic reasons, the table does not include ‘authority’ and the related issue of legitimacy. I would
place authority in the exact middle of the matrix, where domains and levels overlap.

9
The matrix can do entirely without naming power, but for all of the terms used,

‘power’ could be substituted. Moreover, this wide semantic field and the connected

terms give a sense of the variety of concerns we raise when we embark on power

analysis. Even if we explicitly relate only to one power term, it always reverberates

with debates using the other ones – whether scholars are aware of it or not. For

instance, when Dahl (1961) analyzed influence in specific policy domains, he

wished to understand ‘who governs’ in social science terms and yet through this

also the nature of democratic government, while explicitly mobilizing a certain

vision of causality for understanding power (Dahl, 1968).

Conceptual analysis as theoretical critique: A power analysis of power

politics

One might distinguish between three types of theoretical critiques for which

conceptual analysis can be mobilized. A historical take would consist in unpacking

the political battles that concepts carry with them and seeing whether they fit or

contradict the theories in which they are used. Here, I will develop two analytical

ways of using conceptual analysis as an avenue for critiquing the internal logic and

consistency of theories.4 The first way investigates whether the assumptions

underlying a conceptualization within its theoretical context can actually be met

empirically. If concepts cannot just be instrumentally defined, then their

underlying assumptions, including ontological/empirical ones, are up for a check –

4
The historical and analytical takes might not converge. A historical approach does not necessarily view
concepts from any external position, let alone a telos; they are mere outcomes of historical epistemic
struggles. Yet embedding concepts in different theoretical and meta-theoretical contexts provides the
observer with an external viewpoint of the concept. Ideally, the two must be made to meet by, for
instance, embedding concepts in language games or historically contingent purposes, which include
scientific ones.

10
and with the assumptions also the actual theorization. And the second way checks

whether a given conceptualization is coherent within the meta-theoretical

framework of the theory, and/or across the two theoretical domains that

encompass power concepts (see above). This section will illustrate the first by

discussing realist assumptions of power in their analysis, and the second by

looking at recent attempts to import or combine power concepts from other

theoretical contexts.

A conceptual critique applied to assumptions:

Realism and the impossible assumption of a measure of power

The Melian Dialogue, The Prince, and Leviathan are star witnesses testifying to the

immutability of human nature, the wisdom of the raison d’État, or the brutish

consequences of a state of nature. It was self-evident to classical realists à la

Morgenthau, or for the English School for that matter, that realism drew its

wisdom from political theory. It is ‘an attitude regarding the human condition’, as

Gilpin (1986 [1984]: 304) put it. The concern with power was fundamentally

linked to a materialist theory of politics accompanied by a cyclical view of history

that teaches prudence and offers no redemption (Bobbio, 1981).

When realism turned into a social science, it could not let power go. It constitutes

its philosophical core. The transfer seemed easy enough through the specific

anarchical context of world politics. With no world government, the international

system seemed to lack not only an ordering authority, but a polity altogether. This

11
made it possible to think of world politics simply as the attempt to aggregate and

balance capacities to affect outcomes.

In the explanatory domain, power thus became a central variable in a double

causal link. Understood as resources or ‘capabilities’, power was an indicator of the

strength of actors, and consequently of the capacity to affect or control events.

Likewise, a general capacity to control outcomes has been used as an indicator for

the ruling of the international system. Rather than seeing the two domains as

separate, the anarchical nature of world politics could combine them in an

explanatory sequence: by knowing and aggregating who can be expected to win

conflicts, we would also know who or what governs international politics. Within

the table in the previous section, we can see how the analysis of government (top

left) is done through the analysis of influence (bottom right) and its aggregation –

and is also reduced to it.

But both links have become heavily disputed. The causal link from resources to

outcomes was duly criticized by David Baldwin in the context of the Vietnam War.

For Baldwin, the assumed link produced either unfalsifiable ad hoc patches or the

‘paradox of unrealized power’ (Baldwin, 1979: 163). Either the US was more

powerful than its adversary but lost the war, which would however mean, that the

causal link from power to influence was gone and with it the very relevance for

looking at power as resources; or the causal link was there, but that meant the US

was (militarily) weaker than Vietnam, which was surely not what appeared on the

12
balance-of-power sheets, although the latter were busily redrawn to accommodate

the unexpected outcome.

That such patches were logically possible in the first place has to do with the

conceptual ‘flexibility’ provided by the fact that power is not objectively

measurable and is hence adjustable to fit assumptions and analysis. One of the

reasons is the interrelatedness of resources: to be potentially efficient, they need to

be combined in specific packages. Relatedly, and more generally: how do we

aggregate resources – military, financial, cultural, moral, and others – into one

single unit? This assumes a common measuring rod into which the different units

can be converted. Unfortunately, no such thing exists, at least not in an objective

sense (for a constructivist reading of this conversion, see below). In other words,

by assuming a single measure of power, balance of power theories applied what

Robert Dahl (1976: 26) had pointedly called the ‘lump of power’ fallacy.

The underlying reason for this lack of convertibility is that power cannot be

conceptualized in close analogy to money, at least not for the purpose of building

an explanatory (and causal) theory of action. As Raymond Aron (1962), a classical

realist, argued a long time ago, whereas economists can reduce the variety of

preferences (guns or butter) into a unified utility function through the concept of

money, and whereas people can apply this in real existing monetarized economies

in their everyday economic behaviour, there is no equivalent in politics. In real-

world politics, we have no existing measure to tell us how much a billion

inhabitants weighs in power as compared to a nuclear weapon, or hundreds of

13
them. And this qualitative difference undermines the attempt to model power in

analogy to money. Put into power jargon: power is not just less ‘fungible’

(convertible across domains) than money, although it is this, too. More

importantly, power cannot fulfill the same functions in political exchanges as

money does in economic ones: it does not provide a standardized measure of

economic value (Baldwin, 1993: 21). As a result, the analysis of power would have

to be multidimensional, avoiding statements that assume either a single power

index (where resources are fungible) and/or a single world issue area (in which

one resource would necessarily trump the others).

To complicate things even more, a third problem in established power analysis has

to do with the relational character of power that problematizes what counts as a

capability in the first place. For Dahl, ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can

get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.’ The main characteristic of a

relational approach is that it locates power as a counterfactual in a human

relationship, thus distinguishing it from the sheer production of effects (power in

nature). Such relational concepts of power take issue with a vision of power in

terms of its resources or instruments: power exists in and through a relationship;

it is not the possession of any agent (Dahl, 1957: 202-03).

Bachrach and Baratz (1970: 20-21) illustrate the relational view in a famous

thought-experiment. A sentry levels his gun at an unarmed intruder, whom he

orders to halt or else he will shoot. If the intruder stops, it seems the threat has

worked: the sentry has exercised power. Not necessarily, they say. If the intruder

14
was himself a soldier, he may obey because that is what a soldier does when

receiving an order from a sentry. The alleged power resource was ineffectual here,

since it was the intruder’s value system that made him obey, not the gun. Inversely,

if the intruder does not obey and gets himself killed, we may again not be seeing a

power relationship. Since the intruder apparently valued entering the base more

than his own life, the killing only shows the ultimate powerlessness of force

(violence) in the face of a suicide attack. But the example can be pushed to its

extreme: the intruder may have wanted to commit suicide but gets the sentry to do

it for him. In this case, the intruder, by ‘forcing’ the sentry to shoot him, exercises

power over the sentry.

Put in general terms, no empirical analysis of power can be made without knowing

the relative importance of conflicting values and preferences in the mind of the

power recipient, if not also of the supposed power-holder. The capacity to sanction

and the resources on which the sanctions are based are part of power analysis, but

in themselves insufficient to attribute power, since what counts as a sanction in the

specific power relation is itself dependent on the specific values and preferences in

the minds of the people involved.

To sum up the critique of the dual causal link from resources to outcomes and from

outcomes to political order: if power cannot be objectively measured for its lacking

fungibility, we know neither when it is ‘balanced’ nor when it has been

‘maximized’. If power is inferred from effects, the concept is circular; if it is not

inferred, because no direct causality exists, power is indeterminate, and hence not

15
centrally relevant. If it is used in the explanation of outcomes, its relational and

multidimensional character makes it specific to issue areas and even to particular

historical situations in which the different preferences of actors may affect what

resource can count as a power base in the first place. With the link from resources

to outcomes broken, there is no further link to the understanding of the world

polity which can be based upon it. Indeed, the empirical non-equivalence of money

and power makes it impossible for realists to use it as a fundamental assumption

for their theoretical enterprise.

The limits of conceptualization:

Coherence across meta-theories and the domains of social and political theory

Another way to use conceptual analysis for critiquing the internal consistency of

theories consists in checking for theoretical and meta-theoretical coherence when

new ideas have to be accommodated within a theory, or when concepts with their

theoretically embedded meanings are transferred from one theory into a different

one. For instance, ‘habit’ is an idea which is not so easily accommodated within a

neo-utilitarian or rational-choice approach, since it refers to a different logic of

action (see e.g. Hopf, 2010). Conversely, social theories of action that stress

structural components have more problems when dealing with ‘creativity’ (but see

Dalton, 2004). As a result, conceptual transfers can reach limits of meta-theoretical

coherence and may produce significant theoretical paradoxes. I will try to illustrate

this here with the realist use of power.

16
When faced with the conceptual conundrum of needing but lacking a measure of

power, realists could decide to retreat back to political theory and leave

explanatory theory to others – at the risk of conceding to their scientific critics by

preferring not to engage them (for a more detailed critique on this line, see

Guzzini, 2004). Another possible reaction is to stay in the scientific context and

elaborate upon the concept of power. This is where realists in international

political economy, such as Robert Gilpin, Stephen Krasner, and Susan Strange, have

made their most important contributions to the analyses of power. Yet, as this

section shows, their expansion runs into another paradox: either they keep the

importance of the analysis of power but then need to alter the individualist and

materialist meta-theoretical framework which underlies most realist explanatory

theories, or they keep the latter but then see power analysis escape the confines of

realism. I will illustrate this via Lukes’ well-known three dimensions of power,

since his discussion shows how the concept of power, while becoming increasingly

wider, ended up facing internal tensions.

To move beyond Dahl’s conception of power, which undergirds most realist

understandings of power, many realist scholars have widened the concept. They

followed Bachrach and Baratz’ analysis of non-decision-making (Lukes’ second

dimension of power) in that many important issues are decided before they reach

the bargaining stage – indeed, often because they never reach it. This indirect

institutional power refers to the conscious manipulation of the institutional setting

within which bargaining relations take place. It has been theorized in Krasner’s

(1985) concept of ‘meta-power’, and Caporaso’s (1978) and Strange’s (1988)

17
concepts of ‘structural power’. Such an approach is still perfectly coherent with a

rationalist and individualist analysis, since power is still about the individual

capacity to achieve intended ends. As shown by Dowding’s (1991) discussion of

‘social power’, the only difference is the indirect channel to do so. Also Strange’s

insistence on conceptualizing power to include unintended effects, i.e. non-

intentional power, can be accommodated in such a framework (as shown, for

example, by Elster, 2007).

The issue becomes more interesting with the further widening in Lukes’ third

dimension which is inspired by Gramsci. For Lukes teases out an ambiguity in

Bachrach and Baratz’ approach in which non-decision making referred to both

‘ante-decisions’ and ‘systematic bias’ (Guzzini, 1993: 462; for an earlier pointer to

this ambiguity, see Debnam, 1984: 24). The latter refers to an impersonal

‘mobilization of bias’ whereby social structures systematically favour certain

agents. It is here that Lukes defends power as a version of ‘false consciousness’ in

which actors come to misconceive of their own interests in such a way as to pre-

empt conflicts breaking out in the first place.

But for the social theorist, Lukes’ approach produces a certain tension: how can we

simply add up Gramsci on a ‘Dahl-plus-Bachrach and Baratz-approach’? Their

underlying meta-theories are divided by the antinomies of the agency-structure

debate: ‘add some Gramsci and stir’ will simply not do, since it contradicts the

meta-theoretical assumptions of the other approaches. As such, it is not surprising

that IR scholars open to the analysis of such impersonal power, but who do not

18
work in a more structuralist tradition, tend to reduce it back to an agency concept

(Caporaso, 1978) or stay uncertain in their theoretical setup (Strange, 1988). In

fact, Lukes’ analysis is also a prime example of the tensions and possible

contradictions when moving between the two domains of power analysis (see fig.

1), the explanatory domain of the social sciences and the domain of political

theory. By proposing a third dimension of power as the impersonal power that

affects social relations through the mobilization of unconscious biases, Lukes

writes in a social science tradition to which he responds (Dahl and the community

power debate). The conception of power is surely structuralist and the reference to

Gramsci consistent (the top right quadrant). But then, the social scientist Lukes

also meets the liberal/radical philosopher Lukes. There, his interest in power is

ultimately driven by his interest in a more radical idea of autonomy and freedom

(lower left quadrant). As a result, and in clear tension with, if not contradiction to,

his Gramscian take, structure and power are not connected, but suddenly

antithetical (Lukes, 1977).

A similar mixing between the two domains and between a micro and macro

approach to power can also be seen in the debate around the ‘benefit fallacy’ of

power (Barry, 1989 [1975]: 315; Polsby, 1980: 208). Seen from an individualist

approach, power as systematic bias has been criticized for overstretching the

concept by deducing power from rewards. A free-rider who systematically profits

from a certain structure but otherwise remains at its mercy is usually not called

19
powerful, but, at best, described as having ‘systematic luck’ (Dowding, 1991: 137).5

Yet the benefit fallacy exists only within a causal and individualist framework

itself, where outcomes only count when they can be traced back to an action which

caused them. To say that a society is arranged such as to systematically benefit

certain people is inspired by more structuralist theories that do not tie power to

action. For their understanding of power in a social system, and for anyone

interested in understanding systems of rule and domination, it seems odd not to

take into account the effects of that system which can systematically advantage

some actors: the ‘tacit power of the strong’. In this theoretical context, the benefit

fallacy does not apply.

These illustrations show that widening the meaning of concepts needs to be

consistent with the theoretical context in which this takes place. This applies to the

meta-theoretical strictures like the agency-structure debate, but also the passage

between the explanatory and philosophical domain, as seen with Lukes. When

returning to our case of realist power analysis which included more and more

structural factors, it requires making a theoretical choice. If the individualist and

rationalist setup of realism does not allow for such a wider analysis, then one side

must give. Either realists will exclude such power concerns, as Knorr (1973: 77-

78) did when calling Perroux’s concept of ‘dominance’ incidental, or they will have

to re-arrange their meta-theoretical assumptions to integrate and account for them

– an invitation I issued some time ago when, following Richard Ashley’s lead, I

proposed Bourdieu’s theory of domination to translate the concerns of Foucault

5
Dowding (1996: 94ff.) later included systematic luck not in a concept of power but at least in a wider
analysis of power, without really elucidating the exact link.

20
into an explanatory theory (Guzzini, 1993: 471-74). This dilemma exposes a basic

tension in realism: realist political philosophy cannot let the central importance of

power go, yet attempts to translate it into an explanatory theory tend to reduce it

to a ‘currency’ of world politics with which to realize ‘influence’, a far cry from the

concerns of Weber and Morgenthau, for instance.

The need for coherence between concepts and (meta-)theories also implies that

recent typologies which simply add new qualifiers to power are not very helpful,

since they suggest that one can simply add new facets to one and the same

approach. Adding Foucault to Lukes without any translation into a coherent meta-

theory and social theory, as Barnett and Duvall (2005) do, makes for no coherent

typology of power. For one, treating Foucault’s approach as just another social

theory of power misses one of the key contributions of Foucault, which is clearly

about understanding the nature of ‘government’ in its old sense, i.e. about political

philosophy. And more importantly, the typology takes the sting out of the

conceptual critique: if one takes the analysis of power seriously, an individualist

approach will end up excluding facets of power analysis a priori, allegedly

irrelevant, reducing them to instances of luck, as seen above. It is not enough to

show that wider concepts allow more or other phenomena to be seen – one also

needs to provide a common meta-theory for analysis across the existing power

concepts to account for such wider phenomena in a theoretically coherent manner,

something a good conceptual analysis of power can prepare the ground for.

21
A performative and reflexive analysis of power: The power politics of power

analysis

In a disarmingly candid manner, Bull (1977: 113-114) conceded that power cannot

be ‘precisely quantified’, but ‘the conception of overall power is one we cannot do

without.’ But who cannot do without it?

The fact that there is no consistent overall measure of power has posed perhaps

more problems to the (realist) observer than to the (realist) diplomat. Whereas

scholars are still searching for a measure that would help fix their analysis,

diplomats do not deduce power in any objective way, but understand it from the

way practitioners understand it. Since power as a measurable fact appears crucial

in the language and bargaining of international politics, measures of power are

agreed to, and constructed as, a social fact: diplomats must first agree on what

counts before they can start counting (Guzzini, 1998: 231). This moves the analysis

of power away from the quest for an objective measure to the political battle over

defining the criteria of power, which in turn has political effects. Concepts of power

are not merely external tools with which to understand international politics; they

intervene in it. After all some concepts, such as power, play a special role in our

political discourse. This means that besides understanding what they mean, their

analysis has to assess what they do (for a more detailed account, see Guzzini,

2005). This moves the analysis onto constructivist ground, since it is interested in

how knowledge reflexively interacts with the social world.

Two issues stand out for our present discussion. First, in our political discourse,

22
power is connected to the assignment of responsibility. Second, power definitions

have a reflexive ‘looping effect’ (Hacking, 1999: 34) with the shared

understandings and hence workings of power in international affairs. By not

making this reflexive component visible, traditional power analysis overlooks one

of the most salient links between ‘power’ and world politics. And by analyzing the

performative and reflexive side of ‘power’, this last section illustrates a third way

of applying conceptual analysis in which the concept of power becomes itself an

object of empirical investigation.

What does power do?

A central characteristic of power is its relationship with responsibility. Such an

appeal to responsibility, in turn, calls for justification. ‘For to acknowledge power

over others is to implicate oneself in responsibility for certain events and to put

oneself in a position where justification for the limits placed on others is expected’

(Connolly, 1974: 97, original emphasis).

This link with responsibility and justification turns power into a concept that is

closely connected to the definition of political agency, or politics tout court. The

traditional definition of power – getting someone to do something he/she would

not have otherwise done – invokes the idea of counterfactuals. The act of

attributing power (re)defines the boundaries of what can be done. In the usual way

we conceive of the term, this links power inextricably to ‘politics’ in the sense of

the ‘art of the possible/feasible’. Lukes rightly noticed that Bachrach’s and Baratz’s

conceptualization of power sought to redefine what counts as a political issue. To

23
be ‘political’ means to be potentially changeable; that is, not something natural,

objectively given, but something that has the potential to be influenced by agency.

In a similar vein, Frei argued long ago that the concept of power is fundamentally

identical to the concept of the ‘political’: in other words, to include something in

one’s calculus as a factor of power means ‘politicizing’ it (Frei, 1969: 647).

Attributing power to an issue brings it into the public realm, where action (or non-

action) must justify itself.

Conversely, ‘depoliticization’ happens when by common acceptance no power was

involved. In such instances, political action is exempted from further justification

and scrutiny. Such depoliticization can happen, for example, when what is

considered power by one party is simply the outcome of luck for someone else.

You do not need to justify your property or action if you were just lucky. No power

and hence no further politics is involved or needed. Here, the discussion links up

with the last section, in which power as impersonal effects or a system of rule was

reduced to ‘systematic luck’, a quintessential move of depoliticization.

The politics of ‘power’: looping effects of power analysis

A conceptual analysis that focuses on the performative character of some concepts

implies a series of reflexive links. A conceptual analysis of power in terms of its

meaning is part of the social construction of knowledge; moreover, defining and

assigning power is itself an exercise of power, or ‘political’, and hence part of the

social construction of reality. As the following illustrations show, the very

definition of power is a political intervention. And having a broader concept of

24
power requires more issues to be factored into political decisions and actions.

The link between power and agency/responsibility in our political discourse has

been the main inspiration of Strange’s conceptualization of structural power, but

also of some neo-conservative and liberal understandings of power. Strange (1985,

1987) developed the concept of structural power in the context of a perceived US

decline in the early 1980s, in which scholars saw the US as unable to manage the

international economy and hence not responsible for its effects. Strange argued

that this had less to do with the US’s alleged declining power than with the US’s

interests that had shifted in a way that was not causally tied to power. To make

this argument, she reconceptualizes power so as to make non-intentional effects

and structural biases visible: whether the US Federal Reserve intended to hurt

anyone with its high interest rate politics, as it did Mexico, was less important than

the fact that it did (and indeed, that only the Fed could have a similar effect). This

perspective comes with significant political implications. Making actors aware of

the unintended structural consequences of their actions raises the expectation that

they will change their actions in the future or, at the very least, require them to

justify why they do not.

In a neo-conservative twist to this conceptual link between power, responsibility,

and justification, the power-holder no longer downplays its power to keep aloof of

criticism, but heavily insists on its power-thus-responsibility so as to justify its

worldwide interventionism. If it were true that the US enjoys very great power and

superiority, so the argument goes, then it is only natural that it assumes a greater

25
responsibility for international affairs. Insisting on the special power of the US

triggers and justifies a disposition for action. US primacy means that it has

different functions and responsibilities to other states. From there, the final step to

a right or even duty to undertake unilateral and possibly preventive interventions

is not far removed. Its role as the world’s policeman is no longer a choice, but

actually a requirement of the system (see e.g. Kagan, 1998). Being compelled to

play the world leader means, in turn, that the rules that apply to everyone else

cannot always apply to the US. The US becomes an actor of a different sort: its

special duties exempt it from the general norms. This is the basis of its tendency

towards US ‘exemptionalism’, where rules apply to all others but itself (Ruggie,

2005).

The political implications are clear. The more observers stress the unprecedented

power of the US, the more they mobilize the political discourse of agency and

responsibility, tying it to the US and the US alone, and the more they can exempt US

action from criticism, since such action responds to the ‘objective’ (power)

circumstances of our time (Krauthammer, 2002-3). Even if the US failed, it did the

right thing in responding to its special duty, and the only way forward is to do

more of the same, the US being the only game in town. The logic is a kind of

Microsoft theory of security: the problem is not that there is too much Windows,

but that there is still not enough.

As a result, debates about how best to understand power are not politically

innocent. By stressing US soft power and its potential decline, analysts can

26
advocate a much more prudent and varied foreign policy strategy that is sensitive

to claims of legitimacy and cultural attraction (Nye Jr., 2004, 2007, 2011).

Obviously the more observers see the ‘special responsibility’ or exceptionalism as

part of the problem for, not the solution, to US security concerns (and international

order in general), the more they may be inclined to double-check the alleged

unipolarity. Inversely, neo-conservative writers tend to strongly stress US primacy

and thereby legitimate, for example, the Bush administration’s security doctrine.

Their definition of power ‘empowers’ this type of policy.

If the international community were eventually to share this assessment, it would

actually create a social fact. The insistence with which Joseph Nye tours China to

plead for a softer definition of power, where countries compete in their

attractiveness to others, in their model character, and hence in ‘resources’ like

movies, is not just an expression of his understanding of world politics; it is an

intervention in it. For if China understood international status as defined by that

very attractiveness, unnecessary military escalation could be avoided and the

nature of world order be changed towards a more peaceful setting. Similarly, the

neo-conservative understanding of the world would actively change the world, not

just respond to it. Here it is hard not to be reminded of the by now (in)famous

words of a senior adviser to President George W. Bush, as reported by Suskind. The

adviser insisted that people like Suskind were part of the ‘reality-based

community’ which thinks about solutions in terms of the existing reality. ‘That is

not the way the world works anymore.... We’re an empire now, and when we act,

we create our own reality’ (Suskind, 2004). This also implies that foreign policy

27
acts are not only about marking a country’s power, but are active interventions in

the shared understanding of power and status that may turn out to be far more

consequential than the individual acts per se.

Conclusion

Conceptual analysis is an unavoidable core moment of theorizing itself – and of its

critique. Every definition provides an ontological component and decision, and, as

such, concepts are the central building blocks in our theoretical languages. At the

same time, concepts allow the possibility of translations between languages. This

chapter has shown that their implicit multivalences allow us to move across

theories and philosophies – while the latter provide checks for the move. As for

power, both as a concept and in the empirical application, the chapter has argued

that power analysis has gone a long way from the early conceptualizations, even if

this rarely shows in the publications in the discipline of IR. In exploring some of

the wider conceptualizations of power, this chapter focused more on the

theoretical work that can be done with conceptual analysis. It argued that

analyzing the meaning of power can neither be neutral nor instrumental. It then

checked the theoretical coherence both of ‘lump’ concepts of power, which assume

a concept of overall power that cannot be, and of the eclectic lumping of different

concepts of power across meta-theories and philosophies. In a performative twist,

the chapter showed that power analysis is not only a critique of power politics, but

that there is a power politics in power analysis itself when certain negotiated

views of power interact with a reality of power they allegedly only describe. Power

28
is co-constitutive with IR theory well beyond realism and with power politics

beyond Realpolitik.

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Macmillan

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the many insightful comments on earlier versions of the paper at

the ISA workshop in Toronto in 2014 and the panel at the ISA in New Orleans in

2015, as well as Cas Mudde and an anonymous referee. I wish in particular to

thank the ISA panel discussant Jens Bartelson and, above all, Felix Berenskoetter

for his very close reading and many helpful suggestions, which I tried to honor as

much as I could.

35