When the French Foreign Minister suggested the USSR might placate the Pope by tolerating Catholicism, Josef Stalin famously quipped, “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” It is an irony of history that the figure whose weakness Stalin scorned helped to catalyze the fall of his empire.

The late Pope John Paul II is widely regarded as pivotal to the events that ultimately led to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. With his churches providing meeting places that promoted the rise of Poland’s Solidarity Movement and his preaching against fear and for “fidelity to roots,” John Paul II confronted Communism’s philosophy of oppression and promoted a revolution of peace. By the late 1980s, Soviet domination in Eastern Europe was crumbling under a wave of peaceful popular revolt. As former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged in 1992, “Everything that happened in Eastern Europe in these last few years would have been impossible without the presence of this Pope.”

History delivered a decisive verdict: the joke is on Stalin. The joke is, however, too easily dismissed as only a joke, as one more blunder of a terrible dictator and one more myopia of his obsolete system. The tale is also a cautionary one that should give cause for reflection. Modern practitioners and theoreticians of international relations agree that power is important, but deciding how expansively to define power remains, now perhaps more than ever, a central question. It is the question that guides this symposium. What is power? By extension, how has power changed, and what is its future?

Power has assumed an evasive identity that academics and politicians alike struggle to pinpoint. Some realists say military power is preeminent, papal proclamations notwithstanding. Some emphasize the economic basis of power, believing political ascendancy impossible without economic dominance. Some swear by people power—roughly the “soft power” of Harvard’s Joseph Nye—that is earned and obtained through domestic public opinion. Still others focus on power wielded through diplomatic means, noting the importance of individuals such as US President Woodrow Wilson, architect of an international order.

A brief chronology of international cooperation and conflict lends credence to each characterization of power. It is in the changing global context, which alters the nature and distribution of power, that the debate becomes critical. Even the past 30 years have witnessed a profound historical shift as borders have become more porous, economic flows more free, democratic governance more widespread, and liberal ideology more accepted. A small terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, has wielded great power against the ostensibly impenetrable United States. Non-governmental organizations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, helped stabilize the Asian tsunami crisis while state governments faced administrative barriers to the provision of relief. And a previously impoverished and politically closed state, China, has sustained an explosion in economic growth that prompts many to envisage superpower status in its future. Today, the means of obtaining and wielding power are changing, and the international system is struggling to adjust.

Our authors attempt to anticipate this uncertain future as they analyze distributions of power in our world and in worlds still to come. Gregory Treverton and Seth Jones begin by demystifying the forces that characterize power and offering an array of analytical tools with which power might be measured. Robert O. Keohane examines which international actors are most and least accountable in the exercise of their power, while Rodney Bruce Hall takes note of the increased contribution of non-governmental organizations to the international arena. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall highlight the strength of “people power,” or civilian-based resistance, as a strategic means to stable democratic ends. The symposium culminates with an interview with Richard Haass, who distinguishes power from influence and forecasts changes in the distribution of power among states and non-states alike.

It should be clear that any understanding of power in the modern world must transcend the question of “how many divisions has he got.” How exactly to transcend Stalin’s question is the complicated but indispensable puzzle this symposium begins to solve.