The Journal of Political Power (JOPP) was established in 2008 by Professor Mark Haugaard, who has served as its editor-in-chief for the past 15 years. During this time, JOPP has become a primary outlet for scholars theorising and empirically disentangling power relations. In addition to being the founding editor of the journal, Haugaard is also a leading theorist whose sophisticated theory of the four dimensions of power is a major milestone and must-read for anyone interested in the dynamics of power and domination.
Haugaard has now stepped down as the editor-in-chief of JOPP, and a new editorial team began its work in April of this year. The new editors-in-chief are Professor Pertti Alasuutari (Tampere University, Finland), Associate Professor Selina Gallo-Cruz (Syracuse University, New York), Professor Mona Lilja (University of Gothenburg and Malmö University, Sweden) and Professor Suvi Salmenniemi (University of Turku, Finland). Heba Sigurdardottir (Tampere University, Finland) acts as the managing editor and Dr Liam Farrell (University of Brighton, UK) acts as the reviews editor.
We are extremely grateful to Haugaard for all the work he has done for the journal. He has developed a distinctive profile for the journal and gathered a community of renowned scholars around it, many of whom serve as members of the editorial board. We know that our task of developing the journal further is much easier, yet it took a whole team of editors to fill Haugaard’s shoes. We seek to preserve the profile of the journal as a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary outlet for debates on power. We continue to welcome both theoretical and empirical papers on various facets of power and resistance and how they relate to interdisciplinary concerns over globalisation, nationalism, coloniality, war, identities, social movements and shifting forms of governance.
Along with our scholarly attempts to understand the constantly changing social world, research also moves forward and introduces both new research questions and new ways of theorising and understanding power and counterpower. For example, new materialist lines of thought have redefined the notion of agency and decentred anthropocentric perspectives on power by zooming in on the interplay between human and nonhuman agents. Struggles over epistemic authority and expert knowledge, connected with deepening ideological tensions and divides, have given rise to what some call a ‘post truth’ society, marked by increasing distrust in science and public authorities. This has underlined the need to understand epistemic pluralism and the practices of knowledge production in the digital age. Climate change and biodiversity loss pose acute questions about the use of natural resources, modes of production and consumption, and the role of different actors, such as states, corporations and social movements, in bringing about sustainability transformation. Wars and armed conflicts in different parts of the world beg us to better understand the underlying causes and histories of violence and oppression, and the possibilities to undo them and build peace. Finally, developments in postcolonial and decolonial thought have raised further normative and analytical questions about the concept of power itself, challenging the historical narratives that provide the grounds for our received conceptions of power. All these abovementioned areas demand careful and nuanced empirical and theoretical analyses of power and resistance, and we hope that JOPP will continue to serve as a leading site for such analyses.
From the beginning, JOPP has served as an official journal of the International Political Science Association Research Group on Political Power (RC36). We are pleased to maintain this link and establish a working relationship between the editors and the officers of RC36. In addition, JOPP has close links with the Society for the Study of Power Relations, which organises biennial international power conferences. The last was held in Helsinki in 2022 with the title Power, Future, and Agency.
In this issue, we have the pleasure of publishing Mark Haugaard’s article, which is based on his keynote address at the Power conference in Helsinki in 2022. The article discusses kleptocracy, authoritarianism and democracy as sociological ideal types of the exercise of political power. Drawing on his model of four dimensions of power – agency, structure, epistemology and social ontology – Haugaard approaches kleptocracy as a type of government that is characterised by coercion as its primary means of gaining power-over compliance. Authoritarianism and democracy both rely on authority as their key sources of political power, but they differ from each other in the ways in which they seek to secure a belief in legitimacy. Haugaard concludes the article by reflecting on the emergence of a new authoritarian leadership style by Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson, Erdogan, Orban and Netanyahu and argues that we can now witness a move away from the democratic ideal type towards authoritarianism and kleptocracy.
In addition to Haugaard’s article on ideal types, this issue also addresses soft power and human susceptibility to power relations. Judit Trunkos and Rober H. Cox explore the use of soft power in New Zealand and Finland. They argue that a perception of geopolitical threat is a compelling driver for states to use soft-power action. The analysis reveals that Finland has a high soft power reliance and New Zealand uses soft power instruments to a low degree. Paul Michael Brannagan and Richard Giulianotti’s article continues the discussion of soft power by introducing a new theoretical framework for approaching soft power. The authors take issue with a Newtonian paradigm of soft power and introduce a quantum mechanics – inspired approach, which they argue provides a radically new way of understanding global politics and its structures, processes and power relations. This theoretical move allows us to better appreciate the complexity, processuality and unpredictability of soft power. Finally, Jonathan Hearn’s article draws our attention to the ways in which larger patterns of power come to bear in actual, complex individuals and interpersonal social settings. The article develops a conceptual framework for understanding how power relationships become anchored in persons. This framework addresses material, emotional, cognitive and moral aspects of power relations at an individual level. The article examines this framework in relation to Weber’s idea of charisma. All four articles included in this issue illustrate well the rich and multifaceted ways of analysing and theorising power that have been the distinctive feature of JOPP.