National Power

Ask why India spends heavily on submarines it may never fire, or why a small country's opinion columns barely register outside its own borders, and you are already asking about national power — the single idea Hans Morgenthau thought explained almost everything else in international politics.

In two minutes

National power is a state's overall capacity to shape the behaviour of other states and international outcomes in its own favour — the concept every realist theory of world politics puts at its centre, and one no scholar has managed to define in a single uncontested sentence.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – III: International Relations on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.