Mapping Power Relations in a Multipolar World

For decades, the analysis of power in the international system has revolved around a few predictable actors: the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Russia. International relations have been interpreted as a contest among major powers, with the rest of the world reduced to the role of recipient, spectator, or arena of competition. This logic has dominated both geopolitics and theory, shaping the organisations that still govern the global order.

But that way of seeing the world has never been sufficient—and today it is less so than ever. In a context marked by the fragmentation of multilateralism, the rise of non-Western actors, and growing strategic uncertainty, it is increasingly evident that national power is no longer concentrated or exercised as it once was. It has begun to shift towards unexpected margins of the international system.

While attention remains focused on the movements of traditional powers, dozens of countries in the Global South are assuming key roles: mediating regional or subregional conflicts, promoting trade agreements, stabilising volatile areas, or serving as platforms for alternative diplomatic initiatives. These developments are not necessarily explained by large accumulated capabilities, but rather by different forms of functionality, contextual positions, and trajectories of mobility that go beyond classical frameworks.

Understanding the new map of power requires rethinking the categories through which it has been observed and, therefore, measured. It is no longer enough to count tanks or tally GDP points. Even the distinction between hard power and soft power proves insufficient. It is necessary to grasp how a state’s national power is configured, how it evolves historically, what position it occupies within the system, and what kind of impact it exerts on its immediate and extended environment. Only then can the shifting of global balances be understood—how, why, and where they are changing. And why, to explain it, looking to the Global South is no longer optional: it is essential.

Power, Mismeasured

The prevailing understanding of power in international relations has long relied on a logic of accumulation: more territory, more wealth, more weaponry, more influence. Within this framework, power is measured as volume, represented as structure, and exercised through domination or control. From the Cold War to American unipolarity, this approach offered a seemingly clear reading of the world order.

From the 1990s onwards, Joseph Nye introduced a significant refinement by proposing the concept of soft power, understood as the ability to persuade through values, institutions, or culture. This idea expanded the conceptual repertoire of power analysis, suggesting that influence did not depend solely on military coercion or economic weight. However, this theoretical broadening did not result in an effective integration with approaches focused on hard power. In practice, both dimensions developed in parallel, without producing a coherent framework to explain how they interact and combine across different historical and spatial contexts.

Despite its terminological adjustments, this perspective has continued to privilege dominant powers and conventional forms of influence. The issue is not one of flawed observation, but of partial observation: it privileges imposition over coordination, values domination more than adaptation, and focuses on central actors while ignoring the foundations that sustain—or challenge—that dominance. By overlooking the capacities of lesser states and the sources of power that do not manifest in military parades or cultural rankings, this approach creates strategic blind spots.

Such methodological blindness has hindered understanding of how certain states with limited resources manage to perform stabilising functions, act as regional hinges, or sustain domestic legitimacies with international resonance. It has also ignored the rise of non-Western coalitions gaining strategic relevance without fitting into traditional models. As a result, the Global South has remained at the margins of empirical research, lacking systematic tools to capture its contribution to the reconfiguration of the international system. This analytical limitation demands new lenses—capable of grasping the complexity and diversity of the Global South not as an exception, but as a constitutive part of the emerging world order.

Mapping Power in a Multipolar World

Rethinking power from and for the Global South doesn’t mean ignoring the major powers—but it does mean shifting the lens. It calls for looking beyond the usual centres of gravity to consider actors long underestimated. The goal isn’t to idealise them, but to recognise their role in the international system. The real question isn’t just who holds more resources, but how their power has evolved, where they stand in relation to others, and what role they play in their surrounding environment.

Yet this perspective has long been missing from mainstream analytical frameworks. For decades, the Global South has been examined through external categories— linked to ideas of backwardness, dependence, or vulnerability. Within this view, its states have been placed at the margins of the system, lacking agency or autonomy, treated mainly as battlegrounds for competition between greater powers. This reductionist reading has created a major blind spot. When their historical trajectories are studied in a comparative light, what emerges is not a passive periphery, but a series of dynamic processes shaped by positional mobility, institutional adaptation, and strategic influence.

This insight brings a dual challenge. On the one hand, it is necessary to build a different way of thinking about power—not to reject accumulation or scale, but to move beyond them through a relational and articulated perspective. On the other hand, empirical tools are required that can capture not only levels of national power, but also their functional articulation, ripple effects, and positional variations across time and space.

This is where the World Power Index (WPI) comes in. Designed as a framework for analysing national power, the WPI looks at three interrelated dimensions: material capacities (such as the economy, defence, and scientific research), semi-material capacities (like population, wellbeing, and consumption), and immaterial capacities (including culture, communication, and cosmopolitan appeal). This trio allows us to observe not only how resources accumulate, but also how they combine and function together. More importantly, as the product of the broader theoretical framework behind it, the WPI introduces a shift in perspective: it treats power as a multidimensional phenomenon, where capacities interact dynamically within an international geostructure that is constantly evolving.

The WPI doesn’t aim to replace other approaches, but to complement them with a lens more attuned to historical trajectories, specific roles, and unconventional forms of global projection. One of its key contributions is to make the Global South more visible—not just in its internal diversity, but also in its collective contribution to a complex and changing global architecture.

The New Geographies of Power

In an increasingly interdependent and competitive international system, power is not only being redistributed—it is also concentrating in specific areas of the Global South that have managed to combine growth, institutional stability, and international coordination. These concentrations do not necessarily rival the major powers, but they do introduce new geopolitical reference points, new governance platforms, and new interlocutors for global agendas.

Regions such as South Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of South America have seen significant increases in national power over the past three decades. Yet the most revealing development is not simply the rise of certain countries, but the fact that this power is being organised through networks rather than hierarchies. The expansion of alliances like the BRICS—in its expanded version—or non-Western interregional frameworks has allowed these actors to move beyond their traditional role as passive recipients, becoming instead catalysts of new geopolitical dynamics.

Unlike the rigid blocs of the Cold War, the BRICS have consolidated a flexible, diverse, and continually expanding platform that enables new forms of leadership within the Global South. Their logic is not to homogenise interests, but to connect different experiences under a shared ambition: to change how decisions are made in the international system. Since 2024, with the group’s enlargement, that ambition has gained both strength and legitimacy.

This kind of coordination has been made possible by a stronger material foundation, growing political legitimacy, and an evolving institutional framework. Drawing on these renewed endowments of power, the BRICS have carved out new room for manoeuvre. Through rotating summits, development banks, sectoral forums, and horizontal cooperation networks, the group positions itself as a driver of South–South convergence. From Africa to Latin America, from West Asia to the post-Soviet space, this articulation does not arise as a response to an external mandate, but as a reflection of new internal capacities.

This process has far-reaching implications for the powers of the Global North. It not only alters historically inherited centre– periphery dynamics but introduces new logics of governance: more distributed, less hierarchical, and connected to neglected priorities. It is no longer simply a matter of enlarging the table, but of recognising that the margins have shifted. For actors such as the G7 or the European Union, this implies revisiting their frameworks of engagement and rethinking their role in an order that no longer revolves exclusively around them. Rather than representing a threat, the rise of the Global South signals a strategic turning point: the opportunity to build a more balanced international governance system, where legitimacy does not stem from historical weight but from the commitment to propose common solutions and the ability to implement them.

Where Power is Absent, but Not Irrelevant

The world map of power is not only shaped by new concentrations; it is also marked by vast areas where capabilities remain low, unstable, or difficult to project. While the regions clustered around BRICS and other emerging platforms represent new poles of influence, other parts of the Global South — such as Central Africa, the insular Caribbean, segments of the Sahel, or certain areas of Central America — exhibit more erratic trajectories, with limited strengthening or no sustained improvement in national capacities.

However, to mistake the lack of accumulated power for irrelevance would be an analytical and strategic error. Far from being passive, these regions occupy sensitive spaces in contemporary geopolitics and geoeconomics: logistical corridors, porous borders, key ecosystems, energy transit zones, expanding digital platforms. These are territories where power is not concentrated — and may even have declined in recent decades — but where strategic competition still plays out: through disputes over presence, external projection enclaves, or interventions driven more by vacuum than consensus.

The paradox is that many of the countries least visible in power metrics are, in practice, destabilising elements or unexpected pivots in the system. Their fragility makes them strategic. And their apparent marginality enables them to influence broader processes: blocking collective decisions, triggering migration crises, disrupting critical routes, or even experimenting with innovative forms of cooperation and diplomacy.

From this perspective, the importance of a state does not always stem from its accumulated capabilities. Rather, it lies in the function it performs within the international order — whether as a transit channel, a geographic buffer, an information hub, an environmental tipping point, or even an institutional testing ground. In some cases, its strategic relevance stems not from the power it holds, but from the systemic effects it produces.

Understanding this reality requires closer attention to the dynamics of relative positioning. It is not only a matter of observing visible poles, but also of recognising edges, intermediate spaces, and actors that — while not powers — function as hinges, crossroads, or catalysts. In this approach, power does not distinguish between “strong” and “weak”, but between those who generate ripple effects from unexpected places.

Thus, the key question is no longer simply how much power is accumulated or where it is concentrated, but how it is redistributed in an international system that can no longer rest on the permanent exclusion of large parts of the planet.

Reading the New Map of Power

Nothing that is happening in the international system today can be fully understood without paying attention to what is taking place on the margins of the Global South. Where previously subordinate roles were assumed, today protagonists emerge. Where passivity was assumed, initiative is now visible. And where chronic dependencies were expected, some countries have begun to build functional autonomy. This transformation does not follow a single formula, nor does it result from any coordinated strategy. It stems from multiple trajectories, combined capacities, institutional efforts, and various ways of adapting to a volatile environment.

The good news is that tools are now available to better observe such complexity. The challenge is not to abandon measurement, but to go a step further: to use it as a starting point for interpretation. Measuring is necessary, but not sufficient. Understanding power in the 21st century requires grasping its multidimensionality, its trajectories, its articulations, and its indirect effects. It is no longer enough to record who accumulates the most. It is also essential to understand how capacities are combined, from where they are projected, and what dynamics they generate. Power does not always manifest as superiority; at times, it lies in the ability to connect, to resist, to propose, or to sustain cohesion in fragile environments.

What is at stake is not merely a contest for power, but a deeper redefinition of how leadership, legitimacy, and international influence are understood. The rise of new South–South alignments, the strategic role of seemingly peripheral regions, and the loss of centrality of traditional poles do not signal the end of the world order, but the need to rethink it. Perhaps the more relevant question is no longer who is in charge, but how the system is configured, who keeps it running, and from which places. And to answer that, it is not enough to look upwards — it is necessary to look in all directions.

If this reconfiguration is taken seriously, the implications are clear. International organisations will need to adjust to a more dynamic map, with multiple centres of coordination and dispersed zones of influence. Decision-makers can no longer operate according to outdated cartographies: they must acknowledge that the sources of legitimacy and leadership are no longer concentrated solely in the North. And for traditional powers, the challenge is to accept that influence is increasingly exercised not from fixed positions, but through complex negotiations — where the Global South is no longer a mere observer, but a shaping force, with its own trajectories and priorities that can no longer be ignored.