Map Your Power
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User guide
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Your scenario
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Your conditions
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Connect conditions
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Observations

Map the power in your scenario

This tool helps you apply a three-part model of power to any political or social situation — a minority community, a policy conflict, a workplace, a historical case. You do not need a background in political theory. You just need a situation you want to think about more carefully.

Justificatory power

The power to control reasons

Who gets to determine what counts as a valid argument, a legitimate concern, or an acceptable demand? This dimension is about the conditions under which people can make claims and have them heard.

In a scenario where a minority community challenges government policy: Does the government engage with the community's concerns on their own terms, or does it frame those concerns as illegitimate in advance?

Domination

The power to interfere arbitrarily

Who has the structural ability to interfere in others' lives without having to justify that interference? This dimension does not require force to be used — the capacity to interfere arbitrarily is itself a form of power.

Does the group face the possibility of detention, deportation, surveillance or exclusion from services — not because of anything they have done, but because of who they are?

Capacity

The power to act at all

Do people have the material and social conditions needed to actually participate — to organise, petition, speak, challenge decisions, and access the channels through which power can be contested?

Are language barriers, poverty, legal status, fear of reprisal, or the suppression of community organisations reducing the group's effective capacity to challenge what is being done to them?

Worked example: a minority community under a hardline immigration government

To see how these three dimensions connect, consider a Muslim or migrant community in the UK under a government pursuing aggressive immigration enforcement and reducing protections for minorities.

  • Justificatory power: Government rhetoric frames the community's concerns as partisan or as threats to social cohesion, making it structurally harder for their claims to be received as legitimate political demands rather than as special pleading.
  • Domination: The threat of arbitrary enforcement — dawn raids, hostile environment policies, expanded use of facial recognition — shapes community behaviour before any individual is actually targeted. The structural capacity for interference is itself the power.
  • Capacity: Fear of immigration enforcement, loss of legal aid, suppression of community organisations and the chilling effect on political participation reduce the community's effective capacity to contest the conditions they face.

These three conditions reinforce each other. That is the point of the model — and the point of the diagram you will build.

How this works

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Name your scenarioGive it a title and a one-sentence description. The placeholders show you an example you can keep, edit or replace entirely.
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Write your conditionsFor each of the three power types, describe five specific conditions that apply in your scenario. Each condition should be a single concrete observation about how that form of power operates.
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Connect the conditionsSome conditions logically imply others across dimensions. Connecting them makes the diagram interactive — selecting one condition will automatically highlight the others it implies.
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Write your observationsShort analytical notes that appear when specific combinations of conditions are active.
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View and use your diagramThe finished diagram shows a diagnostic condition label — a qualitative assessment of the power situation — as conditions are selected. No percentages: the diagnosis names what is structurally happening.
Ready to begin?

Step 1 — Name your scenario

Give your diagram a title, a short context label and a sentence that frames the situation. The examples are based on a Muslim community under a hardline immigration government — edit them freely or replace them entirely.

This appears at the top of your finished diagram. One or two sentences is enough.

Step 2 — Write your conditions

For each dimension, describe five conditions that apply in your scenario. Each should be a single concrete observation. Edit or replace the examples with your own.

Step 3 — Connect your conditions

When someone selects a condition in the diagram, which other conditions does it logically imply? This step is optional.

How to think about connections

Ask: "If this condition is true, which other conditions does it make more likely, or which does it presuppose?" You are not saying one causes the other — you are saying they tend to go together in your scenario.

Click the coloured chips next to each condition to link it to conditions in the other panels. Chips labelled J are justificatory conditions, D are domination conditions, C are capacity conditions.

Step 4 — Write your observations

These short notes appear in the diagram when specific conditions are active. This step is optional but makes the diagram much richer.

How to write an observation

Select the conditions that trigger this observation by clicking the chips. Then write a sentence or two explaining what it means when those specific conditions are in play together.

The observation fires when all selected conditions are active at once. Start with the most important combination — usually the one where conditions from all three dimensions converge.

Analytical observation

Select a condition to begin.

Diagnostic condition
Justificatory power0 / 5
Domination0 / 5
Capacity0 / 5