Compulsory Power

Compulsory power is one of the four faces of power identified by Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall in their influential 2005 International Organization article "Power in International Politics." In their taxonomy, power varies along two dimensions: whether it operates through interactions or social constitution, and whether the relations between actors are specific or diffuse. Compulsory power sits in the cell of interaction-based, specific relations, capturing the most familiar Weberian and Dahlian intuition that A has power over B to the extent A can get B to do something B would not otherwise do.

While often associated with realist accounts emphasizing military and economic coercion, Barnett and Duvall stress that compulsory power need not be material or intentional. It can include symbolic and normative resources wielded by NGOs, rating agencies, or the media, provided the relationship involves one actor directly affecting another's circumstances. Amnesty International "naming and shaming" a government, the IMF attaching conditionalities to a loan, or the United States imposing sanctions on Iran all qualify.

Key features:

• Direct relational: requires an identifiable A acting on an identifiable B.
• Resource-based: rooted in capabilities A possesses (military, economic, informational, symbolic).
• Behavior-shaping: measured by changes in B's conduct, options, or costs.
• Not necessarily intentional: spillover effects of one state's policy on another can still constitute compulsory power.

Compulsory power is typically contrasted with the other three forms in the Barnett-Duvall schema: institutional power (indirect control through rules and procedures, e.g., UN Security Council veto architecture), structural power (the co-constitution of actor capacities by social structures, as in capital-labor relations), and productive power (the discursive constitution of subjects, as in the category "failed state"). For Model UN delegates and IR students, the concept is useful because it disciplines vague claims that a state is "powerful" by forcing attention to who is acting on whom, through what resources, with what observable effect.