Power-based Approaches to International Cooperation: Theories and Implications

States live in a world without a global police force, a world judges, or an enforceable contract law. Yet they still build trade rules, sign arms-control treaties, and run institutions like the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. So how does cooperation happen when no higher authority can compel it? One influential family of answers points to a single factor above all others: power. Power-based approaches argue that who cooperates with whom, on what terms, and for how long is shaped less by goodwill or shared values and more by the distribution of capabilities among states. This post unpacks three strands of that thinking – Hegemonic Stability Theory, power-based research programmes, and the realist account of relative gains – and shows how they explain cooperation as something that flows from, rather than transcends, power.

Why power sits at the centre of cooperation 🔗

Power-based approaches are rooted in realism, the tradition that treats international politics as a self-help system. Because there is no overarching authority to guarantee agreements, states must rely on their own capabilities for security and survival. In the standard typology of regime theory, scholars sort explanations of cooperation into three research programmes that each emphasise a different variable: interest-based theories stress constellations of interests, knowledge-based theories stress ideas and shared understandings, and power-based theories treat the distribution of power among states as the key variable. For the power-based camp, an agreement is rarely a neutral meeting of minds. It is a snapshot of the underlying balance of capabilities at the moment it was struck.

This has a sharp implication. If power explains cooperation, then changes in power should change cooperation. A regime that looks stable may simply reflect a stable hierarchy beneath it. When that hierarchy shifts, the cooperative arrangement built on top of it tends to wobble. The rest of this post examines three ways theorists have developed this core insight.

Hegemonic stability theory 🔗

Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST) makes the boldest claim: international order is most stable when one state is dominant enough to lead. A hegemon is a state with such a preponderance of economic and military capability that it can set the rules of the system and bear a disproportionate share of the cost of maintaining them. The theory is most closely associated with the economist Charles Kindleberger, who studied the chaos of the 1930s and concluded that the world economy needed a stabiliser.

The logic of public goods 🔗

The engine of HST is the idea of public goods – benefits like open markets, a stable reserve currency, and broad security guarantees that everyone enjoys regardless of whether they helped pay for them. The problem is that public goods invite free-riding. Every state benefits from open trade, but each has an incentive to let others carry the cost. This is a classic collective action problem. HST argues that a single dominant power can resolve this dilemma by shouldering the costs itself, because a large hegemon gains enough from a working system to find the expense worthwhile. Smaller states have little capacity, and therefore little reason, to lead.

Pax Britannica and Pax Americana 🔗

The two examples cited most often are nineteenth-century Britain and post-1945 America. Britain underwrote the gold standard and kept its markets open; the United States designed the postwar economic order. The 1944 Bretton Woods conference produced the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the dollar became the world’s anchor currency, with the US enforcing the rules that drew weaker states into cooperative arrangements that lowered uncertainty and stabilised expectations. Cooperation here is genuine, but it is leadership-driven cooperation, not a partnership of equals.

What happens when hegemons fade 🔗

HST predicts that as a hegemon weakens, the system becomes more fragile. The dominant power grows less willing or able to provide public goods, free-riding becomes tempting, and rivalry fills the vacuum. The interwar years are the textbook illustration: Britain could no longer lead, and the United States was unwilling to, leaving no stabiliser to prevent the slide into depression and war. This is also why the theory remains relevant today. Debates about whether American dominance is declining, and what a multipolar world with China, India, and others would mean for global rules, are essentially debates about hegemonic stability.

Power-based research programmes: cooperation as adjustment 🔗

Beyond the single-hegemon story, a broader power-based research programme focuses on how power shapes the everyday terms of cooperation, even among states that are not global leaders. The central claim here is that cooperation often results from weaker agents adjusting to stronger ones. When two states with very unequal capabilities reach an agreement, the terms usually reflect the preferences of the more powerful party. The weaker side cooperates, but it does so within boundaries the stronger side has effectively set.

Distributional conflict and bargaining power 🔗

This strand draws attention to a question that interest-based theories often downplay: not whether to cooperate, but on whose terms. Many situations have several possible cooperative outcomes, and each distributes the benefits differently. Choosing among them is a distributional conflict, and power is the tiebreaker. A state that can credibly threaten to walk away, retaliate, or offer side-payments shapes which rule becomes the agreed rule. The Hasenclever, Mayer, and Rittberger framework places exactly this dynamic – hegemony, distributional conflict, and relative gains – at the heart of the power-based account. Cooperation, in this view, is not the opposite of power politics. It is power politics conducted through rules.

Realist theory and the relative gains problem 🔗

The third strand is the most theoretically demanding and is associated with the political scientist Joseph Grieco. It explains not why cooperation happens but why it is so often hard to sustain. The answer lies in the difference between absolute and relative gains.

Why relative losses matter 🔗

Neoliberal theories assume states are absolute gains maximisers: as long as a deal makes a state better off than before, it should accept it, even if a partner gains more. Realists disagree. Grieco argues that states are positional – they worry about how well they do compared to others, because today’s trading partner could become tomorrow’s military rival. States prefer that the jointly produced gains of cooperation not disproportionately advantage their partners, and this concern can constrain their willingness to cooperate at all. A deal that delivers a profit but strengthens a competitor more can be experienced as a loss in disguise.

The defensive positionalist state 🔗

This produces what the literature calls the relative gains problem. Even when a cooperative arrangement would leave everyone richer, a state may reject or restrict it if a rival would gain a larger share, since that share could later be converted into coercive leverage. The more states care about relative gains, the more one state’s gain is read as another’s loss, and the harder cooperation becomes. Later modelling by scholars such as Duncan Snidal and Robert Powell refined this, arguing that the bite of relative gains weakens as the number of cooperating states grows. Among many partners, no single state’s relative advantage is as threatening, which is one reason large multilateral regimes can sometimes hold where tense bilateral deals fail.

Power-based approaches in the real world 🔗

These ideas are not merely academic. India’s conduct in international negotiations illustrates them well. In global climate diplomacy, India and China have repeatedly coordinated as large developing economies, building coalitions like BASIC precisely to strengthen their bargaining position against industrialised states and to defend the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. That is a power-based research programme in action: smaller players pool capability to avoid simply adjusting to the stronger.

Yet the relative gains logic surfaces too. Studies of environmental talks show that as emerging economies gain negotiating power and their development paths diverge, they grow less willing to stay inside large blocs and more inclined to bargain on their own terms. India’s caution about deals that might disproportionately benefit a powerful neighbour reflects exactly the positional concern realists describe. Cooperation occurs, but it is constantly weighed against the question of who comes out relatively ahead.

Strengths and limits of power-based thinking 🔗

The power-based family explains a great deal that purely interest- or value-based theories struggle with: why the strong write the rules, why regimes built around a fading hegemon become unstable, and why even profitable cooperation can stall over fears of a partner’s rise. Its limits are equally clear. It can underestimate how durable institutions become once created, how shared ideas reshape what states want, and how cooperation sometimes outlives the power balance that produced it. Most contemporary scholars therefore treat power-based approaches not as the whole story but as an indispensable part of it – the part that reminds us that behind every cooperative arrangement sits a structure of capability that helped make it possible.

What do you think? If cooperation mainly reflects the distribution of power, can a rising power like India reshape global rules through coalition-building, or only by accumulating greater capability of its own? And in a world moving away from a single dominant state, do you expect the relative gains problem to make cooperation harder, or could a more crowded field of major powers actually make it easier?

References

1. https://academic.oup.com/isr/article-abstract/40/Supplement_2/177/1886553
2. https://personal.lse.ac.uk/WYATTWAL/images/THEUS.pdf
3. https://www.e-ir.info/2010/01/08/hegemonic-stability-theory-and-the-20th-century-international-economy/
4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/theories-of-international-regimes/1AA0C9A73B9EA7965FA8AD93E0971EE0
5. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/2131460
6. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4615-2790-9_7
7. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/relativegains-problem-for-international-cooperation/EC287DF240C7BDA2C3BC3B6493CC1E75
8. https://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/publications/giga-focus/competition-and-cooperation-india-and-china-in-the-global-climate-regime
9. https://direct.mit.edu/glep/article/16/4/12/14857/Splitting-the-South-China-and-India-s-Divergence