Productive power is one of four forms of power in the influential taxonomy developed by Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall in their 2005 International Organization article "Power in International Politics." Alongside compulsory, institutional, and structural power, productive power refers to the socially diffuse production of subjectivity — how discourse, knowledge systems, and shared meanings constitute the actors, interests, and possibilities that populate world politics.
Where compulsory power is about A getting B to do something B otherwise would not (the Dahlian view), and structural power concerns fixed positional relationships (like capital and labor), productive power is more fluid. It works through systems of signification: the categories that distinguish "developed" from "developing" states, "civilized" from "rogue" actors, "secure" from "threatening" populations. These categories are not neutral; they enable some actions and foreclose others.
Productive power draws heavily on post-structuralist thought, particularly Michel Foucault's writings on discourse, governmentality, and power/knowledge. In IR, it informs critical security studies, postcolonial IR, and feminist scholarship. Scholars like Roxanne Doty, Jutta Weldes, and Lene Hansen have shown how discursive practices construct the very objects — "the Third World," "the terrorist," "the failed state" — that policy then acts upon.
Key features of productive power:
- It is decentralized, not held by any single actor.
- It operates through everyday language, expertise, and classification (e.g., GDP rankings, human development indices, threat assessments).
- It constitutes identities rather than merely constraining pre-existing ones.
- It is often invisible to participants who take its categories as natural.
For Model UN delegates and IR students, productive power is useful for analyzing why certain framings (humanitarian intervention, the "responsibility to protect," the war on terror) become common sense while alternatives are marginalized. Critics argue the concept is hard to operationalize and risks reducing all politics to discourse, but it remains central to non-materialist IR theory.
Example
The post-1945 discourse of "development," institutionalized through the World Bank and UN agencies, exercised productive power by constituting newly independent states as "underdeveloped" subjects requiring Western expertise and intervention.
Frequently asked questions
Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall introduced it as part of a four-part taxonomy of power in their 2005 article 'Power in International Politics' in the journal International Organization.
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