Math has brought me a tremendous amount of agony. So, Robert Dahl's portrayal of 'range' and 'domain' was a sigh of relief. Contrary to abstract plugging in of X's and Y's, Dahl deals in somewhat concrete terms.
Although, Dahl poses more questions than he answers, his depiction of ‘range’ and ‘domain’ makes some sense. The dependant party, or the controlling faction, holds some measure of power on some number of particular activities of the dependant group. These activities can be classified as the ‘range’, while the ‘domain’, according to Dahl, is just the extent of the elite’s power on the weaker party.
Moving on from the same concept, what further piqued my interest was the notion of 'specialisation' in the context of power affecting behaviour.
Contemporarily, the US holds primacy when the discussion of the world’s superpowers is at hand. Yet, is the US really number 1 in every field? Not quite.
Will McAvoy, from The Newsroom, put it more eloquently when he said: ‘We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.’
But, I digress. To put things into perspective, and to see whether power really is a phenomenon of specialisation, let’s take a look at the nation states of Pakistan and Saudia Arabia.
Saudia Arabia is vastly richer, yet Pakistan possesses the ability to decimate the desert kingdom if it came to battle. So, who really holds the power in the realms of international relations?
It is hard to determine that, unless we take into account this concept that power does not have to be a constant binding force concentrated in all spheres of the given scenario. Where one possesses power, the other may lack it. But does that necessarily make the lacking state weaker?
The question then arises; how does one compare power in multiple dimensions of affairs? Is there really a way to determine the overall power value of an entity compared to another?
I do not know whether it was Dahl’s intention to guide his readers to these questions, but these, to me, are questions worth getting around.
1 comment:
Excellent post. A few thoughts.
First off, I like the Newsroom quote. I've seen the clip and it is quite powerful. However, he fudges some of the statistics and it's worth thinking about how we rank things and how we then extrapolate based on this rankings.
Next, I agree that there is a specialized function of power. For example, you look at how Pakistan could militarily decimate Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia could economically devastate Pakistan by launching an oil embargo. Hence different tools can be used to exercise different forms of power.
Finally, I think it is incredibly difficult to quantify and compare how power is examined in the IR. Ultimately I don't think that there is only one way to think about power or to evaluate it. But it is useful to keep theorizing about it.
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