1

Puzzles about Power

Back to Basics Martha Finnemore and Judith Goldstein

State Power in a Contemporary World
E D I T E D B Y M A RT H A F I N N E M O R E
and
JUDITH GOLDSTEIN
1 Victims can become martyrs and help recruitment into the ranks of the weak.
We live in a diverse world. States, organizations, and the people in them are
differently endowed with wealth, knowledge, capacity, and intent. They are
also differently situated, confronting varied arrays of incentives, opportunities,
constraints, and threat. The roots of power lie in these differences, but figur-
ing out the process by which difference becomes power or what its effects may
be has been a challenge for scholars of world politics. Even actors blessed with
resources and opportunities suffer bad outcomes if they pursue unrealistic goals
or employ bad strategies.
The fact that building-blocks of power—endowments, structures, goals—do
not map neatly onto political outcomes motivates our volume. Most of us
would expect better-endowed and better-situated actors to be more successful
on the world stage. Often they are, as the rise of US power in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries suggests, but not always. States endowed with abundant
resources may remain weak, and even “fail.” We often speak of a “resource curse”
to describe resource-rich states like Venezuela or Congo that seem unable to
convert endowments into power or well-being. Conversely, small island nations
with relatively few resources may become major political or economic pow-
ers, as Britain did in the eighteenth century and both Japan and Singapore did
in the twentieth. The same paradox appears in actors other than states. The
International Labor Organization (ILO), with one of the largest budgets among
international organizations, has failed to effect sought-after labor policies, while
the World Trade Organization (WTO), with a far smaller budget, has been
highly efficacious in regulating trade.1 Similarly, resource-poor NGOs, like the
International Campaign to Ban Landmines, may succeed in reconfiguring poli-
cies of major militaries. Why resource endowments sometimes create power and
success, but not always, is a puzzle.
Even when resources create power—in the form of troops, guns, and mon-
ey—that power does not always translate into policy success. Overt exercises of
power like repression and threat can backfire; they may breed resistance rather
than compliance. Insurgencies against existing powers often thrive on repression.

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4 Power and Realism as an Intellectual Tradition
Similarly, vast sums of money may be funneled to poor countries in the form of
development assistance without making appreciable differences in quality of life
for people living in those places. One can hypothesize many possible reasons for
these failures. Goals may be unrealistic; strategies may be bad. But, again, the
link between power and outcomes is not clear.
Power is ubiquitous in all social relations, but as scholars of international
politics we have a particular and long-standing interest in the power of states.
State power has been foundational for our discipline since its inception, and
understanding it is crucial to our field. Even when narrowing their focus to
states, scholars often disagree about how to define state power and have very
different understandings of its consequences in contemporary international
politics. These divergent perspectives can be fruitful. As these essays show,
attention to multiple dimensions of state power is helpful, even essential, to
understanding many of the puzzling manifestations of it we see in contempo-
rary politics.
The essays in this volume point to three possible reasons why debates
over state power and its definition continue and why contemporary scholars
remain puzzled about power’s workings and effects. First, our understand-
ing of what state power is and how it creates effects is often too limited. By
attending to more “faces” of power and more diverse pathways by which it
creates effects, our authors suggest that events that were previously mysteri-
ous may be explained. Second, our notions about the environment in which
states wield their power need to be broadened. “Power politics” is not just a
game for states anymore, if it ever was, and the assumption that the distribu-
tion of power among states is the only relevant feature of the international
environment is rarely sufficient to explain real-world politics. The diversity of
powerful non-state agents and autonomous institutions, both domestic and
international, has led to new theories about these non-state agents and struc-
tures, but it is also challenging to some of our basic notions about states’ own
roles and how state power works. Third, dilemmas of sovereignty make states
and their power much more complex. Many of the world’s 190-odd states
are problematic sovereigns in some way, creating challenges to the exercise
of power not just by them, but also upon them. The traditional assumption
of autonomous states, sovereign within and rational without, is unhelpful in
explaining behavior of these states. These sovereignty dilemmas are not lim-
ited to the weak; even very strong, consolidated states face constant trade-offs
in managing different aspects of sovereignty and power.
We are not the first to make these observations. For decades, even cen-
turies, theorists and policy makers have noted that the political environment
influences how power is manifest and when it has effects. Similarly, scholars
have wrestled with a general definition of power while trying to get a bet-
ter understanding of how and when sovereign units become “powerful.” Our
P u z z l e s about Pow e r 5
contribution is less to offer a new approach or a definitive answer to how
power should be measured and studied, but rather it is to bring power back to
center stage of thinking about international relations. Theoretical trends in the
IR field have favored extensive work on topics related to information, identity,
interests, audiences, and other important topics. While these have produced
important results, they have (perhaps inadvertently) diverted attention from
what used to be our core concept. Although power politics rarely explains all
international outcomes, ignoring relations of power risks missing the under-
lying dynamic of international affairs. Instead of offering a general theory,
our essays point readers to an agenda for theorizing about power, specifically
state power, in coming years. As Stephen Krasner discusses in the conclusion,
scholars have yet to operationalize a general state power theory to deal with
many of the empirical changes and theoretical challenges highlighted by these
chapters. Clear thinking about what the challenges are, though, is an obvious
first step toward that goal.
States, Power, and State Power
We begin with two concepts that have been central to IR scholarship for centu-
ries—states and power. Power, particularly state power, has always been at the
core of our discipline. Policy makers going back to Machiavelli’s prince have
eagerly sought good advice about how best to wield their power to achieve
desired goals. Now, as then, scholars have offered ideas on how rulers, states,
and organizations can best achieve their ends, but that advice is usually con-
tested and often wrong.
One can imagine several possible explanations for this state of affairs. One is
that scholars have mistaken or misleading understandings of state power and the
way it works. Another is that power itself has changed in contemporary politics
in ways that create new puzzles not easily understood with old concepts. Yet a
third is that states have changed in some fundamental way that alters their rela-
tion to power and their ability to use it. Our authors do not all agree on which
of these best explains the failure of conventional thinking about power politics.
All three may contain elements of truth.
There is good reason to think that our academic understandings of state
power are inadequate and, at least in recent decades, have changed more in
response to scholarly fashions than they have in response to transformations in
the real world. Consider the changing ways in which the theory most concerned
with state power, realism, has understood that concept. Within the field of inter-
national politics, the study of state power has been long associated with real-
ism. Indeed, the modern term “power politics” is largely synonymous with the
realpolitik statecraft informed by realist theory. Realism, however, makes power
6 Power and Realism as an Intellectual Tradition
central to its understanding of the world in very particular ways, and that under-
standing has changed over realism’s history.
The earliest, classical realist thinkers emphasized not just power but also fear
as crucial drivers of politics. It was not just growing Athenian power that caused
the Peloponnesian War, in Thucydides’s view; it was also the fear this created in
Sparta that made war inevitable.2 Similarly, Machiavelli emphasized fear, rather
than love, as the most effective way to exercise power and rule others. Entering
the more modern era, we see realists acknowledging the growing complexity of
political life in their expansion of what is said to be components of power. For
example, E. H. Carr’s analysis in The Twenty Years’ Crisis gives a central role to
the power of “international opinion” created by growing democratization and
economic inclusion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 In
all these analyses, power is coupled with and/or filtered through other factors—
emotions, leaders’ skill, mass opinion—to produce effects in the world.
Over time, however, these contextual and tempering factors were stripped
away as scholars sought parsimonious theory. Individual passions such as fear
figured less into scholarly thinking, and concerns with mass opinion largely
disappeared from realist power analysis.4 In the post–World War II era, realism
looked less at the intent of politicians or the emotions that drove them—fear,
love, honor—and more at the constraints they faced from countervailing state
power. Why this should be is unclear, since the postwar world with its new
nuclear technologies would seem, objectively, to be at least as fear-inducing
as previous periods. This was also a period in which constraints on US power
were smaller, not larger, than they had been before. But emotion, which was so
central to early realist logic, was largely eclipsed by a concern to present real-
politik behavior as a rational response to constraints imposed by the environ-
ment in which decision making occurred. Opinion suffered a similar fate. While
the late twentieth century was an unprecedented period of democratization in
which public opinion held more sway in more places than ever before, realists
of the period moved away from Carr’s formulation and actively rejected it as a
consequential source of power. The change reflected a shift in realism’s goals.
While realpolitik survived, even thrived, as a school of foreign policy making, in
academic circles the goal of offering prescriptions to leaders took a backseat to
developing realism as an explanatory theory.
As realists, and the IR field in general, sought more-generalized explanations
for political phenomena, they became interested in developing grand theory.
Again, though, they understood this enterprise in very particular ways. Their
aim, first articulated by Hans Morgenthau in his pursuit of a “science” of pol-
itics and elaborated by “systems” theorists in the 1950s and 1960s, was most
fully realized by Kenneth Waltz in his systemic theory of “neo” realism.5 This
pursuit of grand theory, particularly that offered by Waltz, had important effects
on how scholars understood politics and what power meant in world affairs. It
P u z z l e s about Pow e r 7
imposed a form of rigor and demanded logical consistency in ways that had big
benefits for scholars and the field. It made scholars, both realists and their crit-
ics, self-conscious about their thinking. It forced them to be transparent about
their definitions and assumptions, and opened them to criticism by others in
ways that earlier, more philosophic or poetic, forms of realism had managed to
avoid.
But the pursuit of grand theory, as understood by Waltz and others of this
period, could also become a straitjacket. Its demands for parsimony and logi-
cal consistency often forced IR scholars to be procrustean in their approach
to the world. Events and phenomena that did not fit with prior assumptions
were ignored or neglected, and the field’s treatment of power fell prey to these
tendencies. Power was still central to many scholars’ thinking, but state power
became the only power that mattered. Material power, which was thought to be
more “objective” and easier to measure, ergo more tractable for scientific theory
testing, dominated the field; other forms of power faded to the background. The
distribution of power in the system constituted the international structure within
which states acted and determined interests. Power was understood primarily
as a constraint, preventing states from acting and defining what they could not
do. Structural realism was notably silent about what states actually could do; it
offered no theory of statecraft and few predictions about what states, particularly
great powers with few constraints, might actually do with their power. Some
parts of the field resisted these changes, but these changes transformed most
leading journals and dominant modes of scholarship.
Few scholars would want to return to the analytic style of Morgenthau’s day.
Scholars now demand transparent assumptions, conceptual clarity, and logical
consistency in ways they did not fifty or sixty years ago, and rightly so. At the
same time, they are grappling with political events and policy problems that did
not much concern earlier generations of scholars, and these have implications for
the way we theorize. Concepts change to reflect the reality we want to under-
stand and manage, or so one would hope. The increasing number of failed states
has made realists’ core assumption of “states as actors” problematic. Likewise, the
inability of American military power to achieve goals of stability and democrati-
zation in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests that seeing power as flowing simply from
resource endowments remains problematic. A great many standard IR assump-
tions about the way power works in the world need to be reexamined.
As our authors rethink the role of state power, they are not following the
old realist “power politics” template—far from it. They are incorporating power
into their analyses in new and different ways; they are exploring new forms of
power, new ways of wielding it, and new effects it might have on the world,
some intended, others not. Like earlier analysts of power, they are developing
new understandings suited to the contemporary problems they seek to explain.
The chapters in this volume exemplify some of these innovations but are by
8 Power and Realism as an Intellectual Tradition
no means exhaustive. Diverse understandings of how power is expressed today
suggest critical potential pathways by which power may be manifest in political
outcomes.
The Many Faces of State Power
No single definition of power satisfied all of our contributors. Some focus on
material power wielded by states, but show how changes in the world force us
to reconsider even this understanding. Benjamin Cohen, for example, explores
the way in which changes in the global economy may be creating new power
for some and weakening others as reserve currency status shifts. In the days of
unquestioned and seemingly unending US hegemony, this was never a worry.
Others explicitly reject a purely material conception, as David Lake does in
his arguments about the importance of authority in world politics, or as Peter
Katzenstein does in quite a different way with his discussion of the varied ways
political actors may be embedded in diverse social contexts.
Rather than fall into some myopic definitional trap, we find it most useful to
typologize the different kinds of power our authors see at work in contemporary
politics. This allows us, and we hope encourages readers, to think about the ways in
which various forms of power might interact in politics today. As Stephen Krasner
usefully recounts in his conclusion, concepts of power have expanded over the
past five decades. Robert Dahl’s now-classic 1957 notion that “A has power over B
to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” is
certainly one important form of power, but our understandings have grown since
then. Bachrach and Baratz alerted us to the ways in which a larger environment
of values and institutions conditions power and prevents A and B from interact-
ing at all by keeping some issues off the agenda.6 Steven Lukes expanded notions
about power further by emphasizing the way social systems and cultures are cen-
tral to power in that they generate and structure the interactions and relation-
ships between A and B.7 Michel Foucault broadened our view still further with
his influential arguments about power’s connection to discourse and knowledge,
and power’s work through social relations from the most micro to the most macro
levels of society. Power clearly exists in multiple forms, as David Baldwin pointed
out in 1985 and Barnett and Duvall have discussed more recently in 2005. Being
alert to power’s different forms and the ways in which these forms interact can be
useful in any context but is particularly so for our study of state power.8
To help us organize our thinking about the types of state power we may be
seeing in our chapters, Krasner turns to Barnett and Duvall’s (2005) typology.
As he explains in the conclusion, Barnett and Duvall conceptualize power along
two dimensions that capture the concerns of our authors. On one dimension,
they distinguish between mechanisms through which power works: does power
P u z z l e s about Pow e r 9
work through the interaction of specific actors, as Dahl might claim, or does
power work also through social relations of constitution, as Lukes suggests. On
the other dimension, Barnett and Duvall distinguish types of relations actors
might have. Relations can be direct, which is consistent with Dahl’s approach, or
diffuse, something he did not consider but occurs when A’s interaction is with
“the market” or “nationalism.” The result is a two-by-two matrix identifying four
ideal types of power: compulsory, structural, institutional, and productive. In his
conclusion to this volume, Krasner uses this matrix to show how and why differ-
ent authors choose to focus on different types of power, depending upon their
empirical project.
Thinking about power in typological terms allows us to identify different
aspects of power that may be at work in these chapters and, importantly, allows
us to recognize the interactions among different aspects of power in the world.
Lloyd Gruber’s analysis in this volume shows how US power works, not just as
a form of Dahlian compulsion but as a form of power that is both institutional
and productive: “All states try to influence their external environments, but the
United States didn’t just try—it has succeeded.” By creating new international
institutions, such as the GATT in Richard Steinberg’s chapter, and disseminating
new values, such as economic liberalism, the United States both exercised and is
subsequently affected by several types of power. Likewise, Arthur Stein explores
the way terrorist power differs from conventional compulsion through its manip-
ulation of more diffuse and social aspects of its relations with its targets: “creating
fear rather than destroying military capability” is analytically a very different form
of power, one “totally inexplicable in our conventional focus on military power.”
This multifaceted understanding of power encourages us to think more
broadly about the relationship between states and power, and our authors do
this in a variety of ways. Two themes are particularly striking. Many of these
authors see a need to reconceptualize the environment in which states act to
accommodate contemporary changes. These new relations between states and
their environment are a logical outgrowth of the broader views of power that
attend to institutions and structures, mentioned above. In addition, a number of
authors also found that conventional IR assumptions about states themselves—
about their coherence and sovereign control—needed reexamination. We take
these up in the next two sections.
What Kind of World Do States Live In?
The old realist mantra was “We live in a world of states.” That world is gone, if it
ever really existed. In this volume, a number of our authors asked a different ques-
tion: In what kind of world do states live? States remain important, often the most
important, actors in world politics, but as our authors make clear, states today
10 Power and Realism as an Intellectual Tradition
are not the only agents wielding power. A host of other actors—some new, some
not—are crucially important to understanding the politics we see. Corporations,
terrorist groups, international organizations, empires, polities, NGOs, and substate
groups all emerge from this collection as central components of contemporary
politics. Not only do our authors encounter diverse actors, but also these actors
are navigating a complex structural topography of international law, norms, rules,
and economic arrangements that manifest themselves in all kinds of diverse struc-
tures—public-private partnerships, institutions, hierarchies, polities, and empires.
This is a far cry from the parsimonious Waltzian notion of structure as distribu-
tion of material state power. These structures of ideas, laws, and economic ties are
often not anchored in any single state or even in states at all. They often “take on
a life of their own” and create effects that are often hard to trace back to states.
Our notions of “structure” in the international system have clearly become
more complex, and these demand new thinking about how power works through
and on those structures. For example, Daniel Drezner finds that instead of exist-
ing in an atomized environment created only by state capabilities, states live in a
very institutionalized world where “cooperation under anarchy is no longer a cen-
tral problem.” He argues that states face “complex legal and technical rules” and,
like David Lake, sees authority relationships to be far more consequential than
is normally recognized in realist power analysis. Steinberg also sees legal struc-
tures as a centerpiece of the international environment facing developing states
especially and argues that these international trade structures actually reconfig-
ure states themselves in the developing world. Here, international structures like
law and organizations are doing far more than merely encouraging cooperation
between nations—they are actively reshaping domestic institutions, often in
ways that bolster states, rather than threaten or weaken them. Global markets
shape and constrain state choice, Cohen tells us, and these effects, according
to Gruber, have increased with the deepening and broadening of globalization.
The result of this is not simply “sovereignty at bay,” where strong states, even
hegemons, may find themselves at the mercy of private economic actors.9 The
effects of markets and globalization are more profound; they reconfigure domes-
tic electoral politics inside powerful states, as in Gruber’s chapter, and gener-
ate new social realities, such as complex financial instruments, new hierarchies
of reserve currencies, and a changing consensus on the legitimate relationship
between markets and government, as Benjamin Cohen and Peter Gourevitch
point out. Shared ideas and norms, too, exercise power over national leaders by
galvanizing new social groups domestically and transnationally and convincing
publics of the value of new goals and policies.
Effects created by this richer international environment vary, and different
aspects of the environment interact in diverse ways with nation states. States also
vary in their ability to both control events within their own borders and to proj-
ect their interests onto the world stage. In part, this reflects the interpenetration
P u z z l e s about Pow e r 11
of states with their environment. Corporations, transnational interest groups,
even terrorist cells are not completely separate from states. Corporations are cre-
ated by states, are subject to state laws, and have interests that overlap with those
of states. Transnational interest groups, too, are composed of citizens and often
work through or with states. The same applies, perhaps in a more limited way,
to terrorist and criminal groups. The existence of these cross-national identities,
interests, and norms shapes states and the ways they exercise power. While we
have long been aware that non-state actors, and structures of law, norms, and
identities matter, the field has not reached a consensus on how they matter and
the effects they create. Still, no analysis of international politics in the twenty-
first century can ignore their role in international politics.
What Happens When States Become
Problematic Sovereigns?
Coupled with the assumption that states are the actors that matter, many IR
scholars routinely assume that states are competent and reasonably effective in
their exercise of power. When pressed, they would of course acknowledge excep-
tions, but the prevailing view, all too often, is that state control and competence
can be taken for granted in the construction of IR theory and analysis of politics.
Waltz himself had self-consciously “black boxed” the state and set aside internal
processes of foreign policy making, believing that this simplifying move assisted
theory building. The consequence for the IR theory enterprise was to downplay,
for several decades, fundamental differences in states’ internal structures, values,
and goals. Thus, a generation of students was taught to think about nations as
“billiard balls” and political outcomes as a result of their relative material power.
This theoretical formulation put all the analytic weight on the international dis-
tribution of state power as scholars investigated the extent to which anarchy
dictated state action. The internal workings of states, their goals and their com-
petence to pursue national interests, were of secondary consideration.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, this assumption came under intense scrutiny.
Real-world events played a role in this change. “Failed states” became a topic of
concern for IR scholars as they became a pressing concern for US policy. Places
like Somalia, Haiti, and Chad that were nominally states lacked the institutions
and internal coherence to perform the most basic state functions of provid-
ing security and order, much less a functioning economy or human rights. The
decoupling of externally recognized sovereignty from any kind of internal com-
petence or control raised a host of policy challenges as well as theoretical issues
for scholars. The result has been a more nuanced set of arguments about states—
what they are, how they exercise power, and how power is exercised upon them.
The “failed state problem” rests on a paradox. Such places are states on some
12 Power and Realism as an Intellectual Tradition
dimensions, notably under international law. They have “juridical sovereignty,” or
what Krasner has termed “international legal sovereignty,” and are recognized by
other states as states. At the same time, they lack “empirical sovereignty,” or what
Krasner has called “domestic sovereignty” and “interdependence sovereignty,” and
cannot carry out many of the functions of a state.10 Can they control their bor-
ders? Can they collect taxes? The answers are sometimes surprising.
Problematizing the state-as-sovereign assumption has been a fruitful way to
understand better the various dimensions of state power for a number of our
authors. For Thomas Risse, investigating new modes governance in the absence
of consolidated statehood shows how such alternative governing arrangements
can be effective if there is a credible “shadow of hierarchy” from businesses,
international organizations, or other external actors. His suggestion that there
may be functional equivalents for statehood raises interesting questions about
ways to create some of the effects of state power through other structures and
actors, without functioning states. Katzenstein also suggests that we treat “state-
ness” as something that varies, rather than as an assumption, and explores a
variety of institutional contexts in which rulers may rule. Like Lake, he deploys
the notion of authority, which he treats as distinct from power, but he does
so in very different ways and with different conclusions. In a related vein, Etel
Solingen explores what she calls “dilemmas of sovereignty” and the kinds of
trade-offs states face. How states manage their sovereignty can have long-term
implications for their power. At the same time, a state’s power influences the
range of options available to manage sovereignty. This is true not just for failed
states but also for some of the most robust and powerful states in the system.
Using China as an example, Solingen analyzes the ways in which Chinese lead-
ers have sometimes been willing to compromise some aspects of sovereignty,
while other times holding firm. For example, China’s internationalizing lead-
ers were willing to compromise what Krasner calls “Westphalian sovereignty”
(autonomy) for gains in “interdependence sovereignty” and integration into
global market structures. They were far less willing to make that trade when it
came to nuclear weapons matters. The effects of these choices then feed back
into China’s power over time.
States and Power in the Twenty-First Century
Understanding contemporary politics requires varied and multifaceted under-
standings of what state power is and the relationship between states’ endow-
ments, situations, and goal attainment. The chapters in this volume work to that
end, providing richer empirical accounts of the varied types of power exerted
by and upon states, as well as the diverse pathways and sources of that power.
Taken together, they provide at least three insights.
P u z z l e s about Pow e r 13
First, the authors remind us that the context of politics matters. This sounds
obvious but in fact cuts against the grain of many long-standing approaches to
the study of politics and power in our field. Often, theories abstract from context,
and they may do so to good effect. But when we move to the empirical study
of policy and outcomes, there is no “state of nature.” Rather, politics, domestic
and international, occurs in a densely normed and thickly institutionalized set-
ting. This social environment not only filters and channels power exerted by (or
upon) states; it also creates new sources of power that states must reckon with.
To study state power is thus to study the context of that power. Today, foreign
policies must accommodate a dense international environment that includes
international institutions, changing normative and social expectations, an intru-
sive global economy, and a rapidly changing threat environment. Analysis can-
not and should not ignore the nuances of this environment, and we should be
wary of universal claims about power’s effects across time and space.
Gruber’s chapter, for example, looks at effects of globalization on political,
rather than economic, structures within states. Yes, globalization has important
economic effects on growth, but it also has important political effects, created
by the patterns of population movement within economically open states: “the
more open a society’s economy, the more likely are that society’s haves to be
geographically isolated from the have-nots.” This “spatial segregation of global-
ization beneficiaries and globalization losers” has implications for geographically
bounded electoral districts and representative government. Openness does not
necessarily lead to a conflict between those that do and do not benefit from
the expansion, but geographic clustering of haves in one place and have-nots
elsewhere may mean we will see increased political polarization around differ-
ent views on economic openness. For Gruber, the global economy’s effects on
inequality are likely to be mediated by changes in domestic political institutions,
which have to adapt to migration flows and population changes.
Drezner also sees the international system as having effects, but in his case the
systemic constraints vary, depending on the “thickness” of international (rather
than domestic) institutions. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the 1980s
and 1990s, when IR scholars emphasized the varied ways international institu-
tions promoted cooperation, Drezner argues the opposite. According to Drezner,
“institutional thickening erodes the causal mechanisms that foster cooperation in
an anarchic world.” As the rules surrounding international regimes become more
complex and unwieldy, only the strongest states will have the capacity to navigate
them successfully. Increased complexity of the structures of international rules
thus increases national autonomy for the more powerful countries, while weak
states are left behind. Drezner calls this institutional “viscosity” or the amount of
resistance to change present in the international environment; as the number and
variety of international agreements increase, forum-shopping opportunities arise,
but we should expect the most capable states to be the best shoppers.
14 Power and Realism as an Intellectual Tradition
Viscosity may also be an appropriate description for the constraints nations
face in coordinating economic policies. Gourevitch points to “structural shifts
in the world economy over several decades [that have] generated imbalances.”
These imbalances favored some actors over others; growth was uneven around
the globe. When the world’s financial structure teetered in 2007–2008, how-
ever, credit everywhere was affected, and state leaders could do little to shield
their nation from economic forces. As Cohen points out, bad policy by a large
nation ripples throughout the system. Gourevitch agrees: “Strong states can pose
a threat to others as well as themselves.” It is “not the failure of weak states, but
the policy failure of strong states” that causes systemic problems.
A second implication of these chapters is that a focus on power is inexpli-
cably tied to the analysis of inequality and/or asymmetries. Again, this sounds
obvious, but the character and the structure of much IR theory have diverted
attention from the implications of this. We live in a world not of like units, but
of units that vary dramatically in their endowments, capacities, and situation, as
well as their goals. Moreover, the simple existence of these differences is a poor
predictor of a state’s manifest power, since the ability to mobilize resources and
the depth of those resources may not be related in a linear fashion to policy suc-
cess. Similarly, the existence of an opportunity or advantageous situation is no
guarantee that an actor can or will exploit it.
Figuring out the processes by which actors use their endowments (or not)
and how different situations create possibilities for action (or not) is a major
challenge. It will require IR scholars to think much more seriously about a field
they have often neglected—foreign policy analysis. Strategy and tactics become
important here, and can produce unexpected results. Smart choices by savvy
actors can surprise us, producing policy success that might on its face appear
unlikely. Of course, foolish choices may have the reverse effect.
Stein, for example, argues that the weak can exercise power with great suc-
cess when they identify vulnerabilities in their more powerful targets and lever-
age even limited resources to exploit them. The weak, he says, depend critically
on technology: “unable to defeat an opponent militarily, the strategy of the weak
is to use explosives against soft targets, often civilians.” The result is a power
paradox: “vast resources have been mobilized to hunt down individual terrorists
possessing rifles and dynamite.” Conventional understandings of state power, for
Stein, are problematic, given his case study. In reflecting on US relations with
the Arab world, he finds, for example, that efforts of Al Qaeda “reflected not its
extant power but its assessment of its prospective power.” Further, the weak rely
on some ideational and more diffuse power resources not always well captured by
analyses focused on asymmetries of material power. In particular, fear (or terror)
and propaganda play a big role as “weapons of the weak.”11 As Stein shows, the
traditional notions of power are poor predictors of behavior for both weak and
strong. Not only do the weak attack, even in the face of apparent overwhelming
P u z z l e s about Pow e r 15
strength, but also and more telling, the strong spend vast resources on defending
themselves from actors that by every indicator should be of no concern.
The difficulty of predicting behavior using traditional views of the interna-
tional distribution of power is also a theme in Solingen’s chapter. Leaders do not
always make decisions that maximize conventional notions of power. Perhaps
more interesting, leaders often face decisions that involve trading off one kind
of power for another. In her analysis, leaders repeatedly make compromises that
appear to undermine their sovereignty, but the consequences of such choices for
power are mixed. “Maximizing sovereignty/autonomy does not necessarily entail
maximizing power, and reductions in sovereignty don’t automatically lead to
reductions in power,” she argues. There is not a set of policies that are the “cor-
rect” international policies for any state. Compromising autonomy (one form of
sovereignty) by ceding authority to an international institution (e.g., the WTO)
as a strategy to gain more wealth may be the good choice at one moment but
not the next. There is no obvious single equilibrium or Pareto optimal strategy
guiding state choices in many, even most, of the situations that might interest us.
Rather, leaders face trade-offs across multiple domains of action. Their options
are often painful and their choices far from foreordained.
Third, the world of politics in the twenty-first century is one in which states
rarely govern alone. Non-state actors and institutions of many kinds are car-
rying out functions all over the globe that we used to attribute to states. This
is obviously true in weak states where NGOs and IGOs may be the princi-
pal, even the only, actors providing security, education, and economic develop-
ment—all standard hallmarks of “stateness.” But it is also true in the developed
world where non-state actors are often based, are politically powerful, and
transnationally organized.12 As Risse points out, “areas of limited statehood”
are ubiquitous and may occur in US cities (think New Orleans post Katrina)
as well as Afghanistan or Congo.
All this makes applying classical state-centric power analysis difficult, yet
abandoning such an approach may be premature. States, power, and state power
are still very much with us, and several of our authors explore the role of states
and power in these overlapping jurisdictions and functions among state and
non-state actors. Recognition that states and state power cannot explain every-
thing does not mean that they explain nothing. States continue to be central,
powerful actors in the world. Ironically, we can see this clearly in reactions to
weak or failing states: where states are weak, that weakness often galvanizes oth-
ers to intervene to rebuild and reconstruct them. When other types of actors
are weak, they are ignored. When states are weak, strengthening them becomes
an international project carried out not just by other states, but by a host of
diverse actors and institutions, as Risse clearly shows. This is hardly a new phe-
nomenon. Historically many, perhaps most, states have not been self-made; they
are conscious creations of other actors. Creating state power, or at least state
16 Power and Realism as an Intellectual Tradition
competence, often serves the interests of others and is a product of power exer-
cised by others who may or may not be states. This suggests scholars need new
ways of thinking about the interaction of state power projection with that of
other actors and institutions.
At the same time, these varied actors on the world stage are bound together
in quite diverse power relations. One such concept that surfaces in several chap-
ters is authority as an important relationship among international actors. IR
scholars traditionally have not trafficked much in authority. We have tradition-
ally considered this a comparative politics concept, something that exists within
states, not among or outside them. The authors in this volume provide strong
arguments to rethink that position, and to rethink authority as a concept. David
Lake makes this argument central to his chapter: we should be investigating
authority and not just power. Lake focuses on authority among states, and the
creation of legitimate authority as the result of hierarchy; but legitimate power
or authority appears to be associated with a range of other international actors.
“Authority is at least an equal form of power,” he suggests, and indeed, “given
that it is usually easier to gain compliance by obligating others to follow one’s
will rather than through force of arms alone, authority may actually be a pre-
ferred form of power.”
In Steinberg’s chapter the authority that is granted to these legitimate
non-state actors is aptly illustrated in the case of trade and the WTO. He
argues that the “rules have pressured not just for the abandonment of certain
national policies [e.g., pro-protectionism] in other countries, but also for shifts
of authority within the state, the creation of new kinds of state capacities, new
processes of policy making, and development of some dimensions of rule of
law.” Joining the WTO is not just a change in commercial policy but also,
more fundamentally, a shift in the form and locus of authority within the state.
Membership in the WTO demands a shift in the purpose of state institutions
and state authority structures so that they “reflect not just US and European
trade policy preferences, but also the capacities and form of the state in Europe
and the United States.” Membership is transformative. According to Steinberg,
this is all occurring in contradiction to a Westphalian sovereignty model of
international politics. The nature of the state is changing because of participa-
tion in the trade regime.
We close with the observation that understanding power today is difficult,
not because it is hard to find asymmetries, but because they are everywhere.
Causality is overdetermined in some cases while inexplicable in others. Still,
power is the glue that connects interests and ideational factors with policy out-
comes. More than ever today we must seek to understand the pathways by which
individuals, organizations, and states are able to reach their chosen goals. This
process, far messier and more diffuse than in earlier times, remains as important
today as when Morgenthau wrote his classic text.
P u z z l e s about Pow e r 17
Notes
1. The ILO’s 2010 budget was almost (US) $727 million; the WTO’s budget was less than
one-third of this amount (at $232 million).
2. Stein (this volume) also notes the role that hope plays in Thucydides’s analysis, and com-
ments on its applicability to Al Qaeda and contemporary power politics.
3. Carr 1939.
4. Theorizing about public opinion mostly shifted to the study of ethics, rather than power,
and played a much larger role in liberal thought than in realist theories.
5. Morgenthau 1948; Kaplan 1957; Rosecrance 1963; Waltz, 1979.
6. Bachrach and Baratz 1962.
7. Lukes 1974.
8. Dahl 1957, 201–215; Bachrach and Baratz 1962, 947–952; Foucault 1975/1995, and
1982, 777–795; Barnett and Duvall 2005, 39–75. See also Baldwin 1985 and 2002.
9. Vernon 1971.
10. Krasner 1999, 3–42.
11. Scott 1987.
12. Avant, Finnemore, and Sell 2010.
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