Exchange Power

Exchange power is the second of Quaker peace theorist and economist Kenneth Boulding’s “three faces of power.”  Exchange Power comes into play in most of our every-day actions, for example, economic transactions when we say, “I will give you Y, if you perform or yield X.”  Exchange Power may or may not be coercive, so in terms of violence it can be positioned between Boulding’s two other faces of power, Threat Power and Integrative Power.

In terms of approaches to conflict, Boulding and most recently Johan Galtung have noted that Exchange Power often merely delays conflict, offering instead, a compromise whereby neither party is happy, but content to resolve the issue for the present time.