Editorial Note

Power rarely announces itself. It hides in familiar places: in markets, indicators, contracts, and code, while shaping the decisions that govern lives. It is not always loud or violent. Sometimes it speaks through silence, through procedure, through what is no longer questioned. This edition of Decypher asks: what does power look like in the present? Where is it concentrated? How does it travel? And what are the stories it tries to suppress?

The theme of this issue is not confined to formal authority. It explores the dispersed, hidden, and constructed forms of power that define our contemporary moment. Across essays, interviews, and reviews, contributors trace how power operates within states, markets, data systems, geopolitical alignments, and even the realm of sport. The result is not a single narrative, but a series of overlapping insights that invite us to read between the lines.

Daniel Morales opens with Mapping Power Relations in a Multipolar World, a piece that moves past simplistic binaries to show how influence now flows through coalitions, transactional diplomacy, and shifting alignments. Power has become more fragmented, but no less hierarchical.

Oscar Rickett’s The Littling of Great Britain offers a sobering reflection on decline. Through a close reading of Britain’s post-Brexit politics, he captures how nationalism has become a mask for economic stagnation and cultural disorientation. Nostalgia replaces strategy, and the empire lingers as both wound and myth.

In Withering American Influence, Paul Krugman flips the global hierarchy on its head. The essay examines how rising inequality, crumbling infrastructure, and dysfunctional governance have begun to draw parallels between the United States and the very countries it once pathologised. Krugman is not being rhetorical. He is identifying the symptoms of a reversal in credibility.

Closer to home, Farheen’s The Long Shadow of Econocracy examines how technocracy becomes a form of depoliticisation. When policy is spoken in the language of fiscal ceilings and growth maximisation, justice and equality are treated as externalities. This is power through abstraction, where economic tools obscure rather than illuminate social priorities.

Aurko Chakrabarti’s The Game Behind the Game: Sportswashing or Soft Power? takes us to stadiums and arenas. Sport is no longer just competition. It is image management, diplomacy, and a way for regimes and corporations to soften their public profiles. Aurko probes the asymmetries in who gets to rehabilitate their image through sport, and who remains morally disqualified.

Priyanka Garodia’s The Changing Contours of the Modern War traces how warfare has expanded beyond physical battlefields into cyberspace, surveillance systems, and media manipulation. The tools have changed, but the logic of domination remains. Information, in many cases, has become a weapon more powerful than artillery.

Power also plays out through identity and memory. In State Identities in South Asia: A Contested Road, Najeeb Jung examines how the postcolonial state has defined itself through acts of exclusion, whether linguistic, religious, or regional. Khushi Kesari’s Monsoon Empires explores a different register of power: the soft, cultural legacy of South Indian kingdoms in Southeast Asia. Temples, rituals, and languages cross borders even when modern maps do not.

In Up the Drum Tower: The Confucian Comeback, Daniel A. Bell reflects on governance, pedagogy, and meritocracy through his experience inside Chinese academia. Rather than caricature Chinese statecraft, he examines it on its own terms and asks difficult questions about how legitimacy is earned, not just claimed.
Manashjyoti Karjee’s Writing on Snow explores the Arctic as a space of paradox. It is one of the last regions where science, not sovereignty, has guided governance. But as climate change opens new routes and interests, that fragile order is increasingly under pressure.

Ashwin Prasad’s Is Space the Final Frontier? surveys the transformation of India’s space sector. The liberalisation of space services brings opportunity, but also raises new tensions around regulation, equity, and access. What was once the domain of the state is now an arena for private capital, strategic competition, and international visibility.

In India, Middle Powers and Churn in the Indian Ocean, Pooja Bhatt navigates the maritime domain, where shipping routes, energy corridors, and naval presence serve as instruments of strategic leverage. India’s power in this space is more about balancing than dominating, and Bhatt highlights the subtleties involved.
Shipra Agarwal and Shivani Singh’s Medical Monopolies and Inverted Pay-offs interrogates how intellectual property regimes and pharmaceutical economics produce scarcity in the name of innovation. The result is an inverted reality where life-saving technologies remain out of reach for many, not because they do not exist, but because access is priced out of feasibility.

Cahal Moran’s Why We’re Getting Poorer unpacks the structural causes behind economic stagnation and inequality. Moving beyond GDP, he questions whether our current metrics can even capture what progress should mean.
This edition also features a SenseMaker interview with Rajat M. Nag, where development is explored not as a neutral process, but as a deeply political and contested journey. The conversation probes how aspirations, exclusions, and strategies collide across Asia’s changing economic landscape.

The issue closes with two thoughtful reviews. Poulomi Saha’s engagement with Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks is a meditation on how connection, control, and communication have shaped human history, from oral storytelling to algorithmic curation. Unnati Gusain revisits India’s Cold War diplomacy in her review of The Nehru Years, interrogating the selective silences and strategic contradictions that marked India’s global positioning.

These essays together reveal that power is not always where we expect it. It is not just about who rules, but about who frames, who normalises, and who disappears from the record. Power is as much about what is said as what is never said.