Sometimes one must unlearn in order to understand. In international relations, nothing is more delicate than defining power. It is ever-present, active, determining, and yet it constantly eludes those who seek to grasp it in a formula or confine it within an index. Measuring power is to dare the impossible: to make the incalculable calculable, to freeze a movement, to attribute a metric to a relationship. The endeavor seems vain, if not suspect. And yet, the stakes are too high to abandon it: the ability to objectively assess power—or to claim to do so—shapes doctrines, structures alliances, and underpins security policies. All diplomacy is an implicit reading of power. All war, a cruel test of its evaluation.
This reflection becomes all the more necessary at a time when traditional benchmarks are faltering. Territorial unity is no longer the sole matrix of sovereignty. Conflicts now unfold in hybrid, cognitive, digital, and informational spaces. Asymmetry, rather than an exception, becomes the strategic norm. Classical realism, with Hans Morgenthau as its tutelary figure, assigned power a material substratum: population, military, economy, resources. Kenneth Waltz pursued this project in a more systemic vein, seeing in the distribution of material capabilities the key to international balance. But today, this vision faces a double transformation: on one hand, the multiplication of forms of power; on the other, their growing fluidity, which renders any fixed analytical grid obsolete.
This was already foreseen in the 1970s by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye. With their concepts of soft power and later smart power, they attempted to reconcile material force and symbolic influence. Yet their approach remained fundamentally Western-centric, based on an implicit hierarchy of values and faith in liberal institutions. Barry Buzan, from a more critical perspective, sought to integrate societal and identity dimensions into an expanded theory of security, though he never provided a genuine method for quantification. David Baldwin, for his part, proposed to understand power as a specific relation—contextualized, instrumental, non-cumulative. But his analysis remained theoretical, distant from the empirical tools practitioners could employ.
This is where the core of this research lies: not merely to question the relevance of measuring power, but to attempt the construction of a theoretical framework that upholds both analytical rigor and the plasticity of strategic reality. In other words, to reconcile what political science has too long opposed: power as structure (potential) and power as effect (operationality). Such a project implies going beyond the materialist/post-materialist dichotomy that often stifles debate. One must recognize that power today cannot be reduced to either stocks (of weapons, currencies, populations) or symbols (soft power, norms, values), but rather resides in the shifting arrangement of both. What Michel Foucault called “governmentality” could offer a fruitful path here: to conceive of power not as a thing, but as a strategic assemblage of heterogeneous elements.
But such a theoretical ambition cannot dispense with a critical gaze upon its own foundations. To measure is always to produce an effect. A ranking is never neutral. It acts, performs, elicits reactions, legitimizes justifications. We measure in order to act, but the action alters what we measure. This is what Pierre Bourdieu sharply analyzed in his work on the performativity of social classifications: every metric is also a symbolic strategy. In international relations, this implies that the actors being measured can adapt their behavior to the measurement—or attempt to subvert it. Measurement creates an implicit norm, a horizon of legitimacy. It induces thresholds, competition, stigmatization, or escalation.
This is why this research proposes to articulate a theoretical framework with pragmatic vigilance. It is not about imagining yet another index, but about reflecting on the conditions of possibility for a model of measurement suited to our time. This entails examining the effects of measurement itself: on defense policies, on engagement doctrines, on influence strategies, but also on perceptions—both internal and external—of sovereignty and security. The work of James C. Scott on the legibility of the social world by the state offers valuable insight here: any operation of statistical simplification—even if justified—produces a loss of complexity, a reduction of reality to what is measurable, and therefore governable.
Such vigilance does not exclude methodological ambition. We must seek to identify indicators that account not only for traditional dimensions (military spending, economic growth, industrial capacities), but also for hybrid factors: cyber defense, national cohesion, information control, strategic autonomy, institutional robustness, normative appeal. Dynamic models, inspired by the sciences of complexity (Edgar Morin), could help to model systemic interactions among these elements, without freezing them into a definitive hierarchy.
Yet every attempt at quantification faces a double challenge: on one hand, the diversity of contexts—an indicator relevant for France may not be so for Turkey or India; on the other, informational asymmetry—reliable data are scarce, biased, manipulated, or simply inaccessible. Theories of information warfare, particularly those developed by Thomas Rid, reveal how data production itself has become a battleground. This calls for rethinking measurement as a strategic act, subject to cognitive as well as operational power relations.
Power, therefore, is inseparable from its representation. It is what one believes it is, what others believe it is, what one succeeds in making others believe it is. This eminently reflexive character must be integrated into any model of measurement. Niklas Luhmann’s work on the complexity of social systems offers a useful path here: power must be conceived as a self-referential system, whose elements (resources, capacities, representations, effects) mutually influence one another, with no fixed point or external reference.
But beyond theory and method lies a philosophical question: what becomes of power when it is measured? Does it lose its unpredictability? Its capacity for concealment? Its deterrent function? Historically, the greatest powers have often been those that escaped measurement: Rome through its legitimacy, the USSR through its opacity, the United States through its ubiquity. Conversely, the will to measure everything has sometimes been a prelude to decline—as if the obsession with knowing one’s own power already betrayed a loss of it.
This tension must be acknowledged. For power to remain effective, it must retain a degree of undecidability. Yet for strategy to remain rational, it must rely on criteria, measures, evaluations. It is in this in-between that this work situates itself: between rigor and uncertainty, between modeling and pragmatism, between knowledge and power. The goal is less to resolve the aporia than to render it productive: to make measurement a tool of analysis, without turning it into a new form of dogma. As Michel Serres wrote, “the real is what resists.” So too is power.
Ultimately, this project proposes to reexamine the theoretical foundations, pragmatic modalities, practical mechanisms, and reflexive implications of power measurement in a multipolar, hybrid, and uncertain world. It belongs to a critical tradition, yet aims at strategic utility. Its purpose is not to produce a universal truth, but a robust, falsifiable, and adaptable framework—capable of thinking power differently, and perhaps, of measuring it a little better.
How to measure power ? 