The Concept of Power

It has become more commonplace to stress the centrality of the concept of power for constructivist meta-theory and theorising (see, in particular, Hopf 1998, Guzzini 2000a). Moreover, constructivism has put some order into its own power concepts, which usually come as variations on the theme of ‘Lukes-plus- Foucault’ (Guzzini 1993, Barnett and Duvall 2005a). Therefore, this chapter will take a slightly different tack. Rather than exploring once again what the concept of power can mean for constructivists, it analyses the implications of constructivism for doing a conceptual analysis, here of power. ¹ It will try to show that besides an analytical assessment (‘What does power mean?’), a constructivist conceptual analysis also includes a study of the performative aspects of concepts (‘What does “power” do?’), which, in turn is embedded into a conceptual history or genealogy (‘How has “power” come to mean and be able to do what it does?’). Indeed, by stressing the reflexive relationship between knowledge and social reality, such a conceptual analysis is itself part (but only part!) of a more general constructivist power analysis.