An instrument, not an opinion.
The Structural Power Project is an annual measure of structural power across twelve nations, built on Susan Strange's framework from States and Markets (1988). It is researched, scored, and assembled with AI assistance under a deterministic, reproducible pipeline.
Susan Strange · 1923–1998
The framework this Project measures is hers. Before there can be an index, there has to be her argument about where power lives — so it is worth knowing who she was, and what she actually claimed.
A founder of international political economy and one of its most influential dissenting voices. Strange argued that the conventional question — who won this bargain, who has the bigger army or economy — misses where power actually lives. Real power is structural: the ability to shape the frameworks within which all bargains happen, so that others' choices are already constrained before they sit at the table.
In States and Markets she set out four such structures — security, production, finance, and knowledge — and insisted that whoever sets their terms holds power even without exercising it directly. She also warned—specifically of the knowledge structure, in words that apply index-wide—that such power is "unquantifiable" and that "the indicators that can be found are only the roughest of guides." This Project takes that warning seriously: it does not claim to measure structural power exactly, only to make a disciplined, transparent attempt — and to show its workings.
Why now
Strange distrusted quantification because the tools of her time could count only capability — warheads, output, reserves — and so kept collapsing who sets the terms into who holds the most, the very confusion she wrote against. That constraint has eased. Authoritative sources can now be read and judged, at a breadth and speed she could not have imagined, into a direct assessment of authorship and gatekeeping rather than a proxy for them. This Project is an attempt to give her framework the quantitative shape she thought impossible — built deliberately as an instrument to be argued with, with every judgment sourced and shown, so the attempt can be checked rather than merely believed.
What this is — and isn't
It is an instrument: a single, reproducible attempt to score Strange's four structures across twelve nations, with every component traceable to its source and its reasoning shown on each country's page. It is not a verdict on national greatness, a forecast, or a ranking of who is "winning." Possession — warheads, GDP, reserves held — is deliberately excluded; the index asks who authors the rules, not who holds the most. The country set (the G7 and the BRICS five of our twelve) is disclosed as the universe, not treated as the world.
The Project is circulated openly for scholarly critique. Its methodology, its decisions, and its known limitations are all on the record — because an instrument earns trust by showing how it works, not by hiding the joints.
Cite this edition
Rodríguez Cordero, J. P. (2026). The Structural Power Index — Edition 2026 (Version 2026.1) [Dataset & Report]. The Structural Power Project. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20814379
DOI (this edition): 10.5281/zenodo.20814379 · DOI (all editions): 10.5281/zenodo.20814378 · Archived on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0.
Contact
Corrections, critique, collaboration, or data questions are welcome. The Project is built to be argued with.