Power and International Relations: a temporal view
| Author | Daniel Drezner |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066120969800 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
research-article2020
EJ R
I
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
Power and International
2021, Vol. 27(1) 29 –52
© The Author(s) 2020
Relations: a temporal view
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120969800
DOI: 10.1177/1354066120969800
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Daniel Drezner
Tufts University, USA
Abstract
International Relations scholars are certain about two facts: power is the defining
concept of the discipline and there is no consensus about what that concept means.
One explanation for this problematic state of the field is that most International
Relations scholars freight their analyses of power with hidden assumptions about time.
Temporality is an essential component of political analysis, as a burgeoning literature
has begun to explore. This paper argues that there are two latent presumptions about
time that fundamentally affect how scholars conceptualize power in world politics. First,
scholars are rarely explicit in defining the temporal scope of their key causal processes.
The longer the implicit temporal scope, the more expansive their definition and
operationalization of power can be. Second, there is considerable variation of beliefs
about the temporal returns to power: does exercising or accumulating power generate
positive or negative feedback effects over time? Relying on canonical works in the
field, this paper examines the hidden assumptions that different paradigms make about
power and time. Illuminating these assumptions clarifies the root of cross-paradigmatic
disagreements about international politics and suggests some interesting pathways for
future theoretical and empirical work.
Keywords
Power, International Relations, realism, constructivism, critical theory, liberalism
Introduction
International Relations (IR) scholars do not agree about much, but they are certain about
two facts: power is the defining concept of the discipline and there is no consensus about
what that concept means. This dissensus over the basic underpinnings of IR is problem-
atic for scholars interested in the cumulative construction of knowledge. Lake (2011:
Corresponding author:
Daniel Drezner, Tufts University, 160 Packard Ave, Medford, MA 02155, USA.
Email: daniel.drezner@tufts.edu
30
European Journal of International Relations 27(1)
472–473), one of the biggest proponents of abandoning grand theorizing, argues that,
“To enhance understanding, we need to be able to communicate across theoretical tradi-
tions, compare assumptions, and interpret findings. . . . we need a lexicon that allows
translation across theories.” If there is no inter-paradigmatic agreement about the con-
cept of power—one of the conceptual building blocks of the discipline—Lake’s notion
of progress is a chimera.
The centrality of power to the study of IR is uncontested. Is it possible, however, for
scholars operating in different paradigms to agree on what they are talking about? This
paper attempts to reconceptualize the role that power plays in IR theory. I argue that the
underlying source of disputed concepts of power is that most scholars freight their analy-
sis with hidden assumptions about time. Drawing from a burgeoning literature on time
and world politics, I argue that there are two key assumptions about time that fundamen-
tally affect how scholars think about power. First, scholars are rarely explicit in defining
the temporal scope of key causal processes in their area of inquiry. The longer the time
required for significant causal processes to play out, the more capacious the definition
and operationalization of power must be. Second, there is considerable variation of
beliefs about the temporal returns to power. Does the exercise or accumulation of power
in the present generate positive or negative feedback effects over time?
There are multiple conceptual and theoretical rewards from this exercise. Illuminating
these assumptions makes it easier to understand a key source of inter-paradigmatic dis-
putes about power. As with other recent conceptual research on power (Reed, 2013),
however, this is not merely a typological exercise. This paper also demonstrates the ways
in which implicit temporal assumptions form an important part of each paradigm’s inter-
nal logic. Clarifying the core assumptions, or negative heuristic, of each model allows
for more progress in theory building (Lakatos, 1971), enables more inter-paradigmatic
debate, and suggests key empirical questions for future research.
This paper is divided into five sections. The section “Power and IR theory” briefly
discusses the state of the power literature and why a conceptual rethink is needed. The
section “A temporal perspective on power” considers the ways in which an explicitly
temporal perspective affects how one should think about power. The section “Time,
power, and IR theory” applies this perspective to the major IR paradigms, utilizing the
canonical texts in each school of thought to reveal their assumptions about power and
time. The final section summarizes and concludes.
Power and IR theory
The centrality of power to the study of politics is beyond dispute. In Power and Society,
Laswell and Kaplan (1950: 75) state: “The concept of power is perhaps the most funda-
mental in the whole of political science; the political process is the shaping, distribution,
and exercise of power.” Classical texts ranging from Thucydides’ History of the
Peloponnesian War to Kautilya’s Arthashastra to Ibn Khaldûn’s Muqaddimah focus
even more on the centrality of power. Morgenthau (1948: 31) wrote in Politics Among
Nations that, “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever
the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.” Leading
introductory textbooks on IR start with a discussion about power (Goldstein and
Drezner
31
Pevehouse, 2016; Nau, 2017). Guzzini (2017: 739) notes, “Power seems to be an explan-
atory concept nobody in IR can do without.” Even IR scholars who have questioned the
assumption of anarchy (Mattern and Zarakol, 2016: 625) nonetheless agree that the inter-
national system is “deeply implicated with power.”
Power may be the central concept of the discipline, but scholars cannot agree on how
to define or measure it. The most widely cited definition in political science is Dahl’s
(1957: 202–203) “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that
B would otherwise not do.” Most scholars, however, cite Dahl’s definition only to cri-
tique it. Almost immediately after Dahl offered his concept of power, scholars and theo-
rists layered on additional dimensions to the term. Depending on whom one reads, there
are three or four different faces of power (Digeser, 1992; Lukes, 2005). Gilpin (1981: 13)
writes, “The concept of power is one of the most troublesome in the field of international
relations and, more generally, political science.” Guzzini (2000: 53) concurs stating,
“Power is ubiquitous. . . at the same time, power is one of the most under-researched
concepts in the discipline.”
A historiography of the literature highlights the difficulties of this topic. Many of
the pioneering works on this subject—Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (at least
seven editions), Dahl’s Modern Political Analysis (at least six editions), Lukes’ Power:
A Radical View (two editions) —have muddied the conceptual waters. The authors of
these iconic texts have either revised them multiple times or published follow-on work
that altered their conceptual definitions. Joseph Nye has written about soft power
(Nye, 2004), smart power (Nye, 2009), and sharp power (Nye, 2018). One recent text
to survey this ground (Baldwin, 2016) devotes the bulk of its pages to relitigating
Dahl’s definition.
Offering a new conceptual definition of power will not solve the problem. The adjec-
tives that precede the noun “power” in the IR literature speak to the degree of conceptual
confusion: hard power, soft power, smart power, sharp power, network power, social
power, ideational power, discursive power, productive power, protean power, symbolic
power, structural power, relational power—the list is endless. To infer that power suffers
from some conceptual fuzziness seems like an understatement. Some scholars go even
further, arguing that a single definition of the term is impossible. The most widely cited
IR article on the topic in this century (Barnett and Duvall, 2005: 41) asserts that, “power
works in various forms and has various expressions that cannot be captured by a single
formulation.” There are serious scholarly debates about whether it will ever be possible
to create a common conception (Guzzini, 2005, 2009; Pansardi, 2012). This problem has
been compounded by the enormous gap between theoretical debates about power and
efforts to operationalize the concept. Guzzini (2005: 502) correctly diagnoses the power
literature when he warns, “faced with the difficulty of pinning down a concept, scholars
decide to go for its more easily operationalizable aspects but they thereby incur the risk
of neglecting its more significant aspects.”
Having a central concept so poorly defined is a problematic state of affairs for the
discipline. It contributes to intellectual monocultures (McNamara, 2009) and partially
explains the current consensus (Dunne et al., 2013: 406)...
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