Eleven Years of Exploring Political Power

On July 24, Michael Poulshock marked eleven years since beginning an inquiry into the nature of political power — a project that started with a simple daydream on a beach in Jamaica. What began as a thought experiment about the power imbalance between small and large nations grew into a long-term exploration, producing daily reflections, thousands of notebook pages, and even a book, Power Structures in International Politics.

Poulshock describes his effort as a personal “science project,” carried forward not for recognition or payment but out of persistent curiosity. He has spent over 10,000 hours sketching equations, testing ideas, and revising assumptions, often only to encounter dead ends. Yet the rare breakthroughs — moments of clarity when solutions present themselves as obvious — have sustained the project over the years.

The work has had no fixed roadmap, branching into questions of cooperation and conflict, simulations of political behavior, and even speculations on interplanetary politics. For Poulshock, curiosity itself has been the driving force, propelling him to continue despite uncertainty about whether the project will ever yield a definitive or useful outcome.

Reflecting on the journey, Poulshock acknowledges the possibility that the project may amount to little more than personal notebooks. Still, he views the ideas that come to him as carrying an obligation to be pursued and shared, no matter how elusive the answers may be.

Read more here: Eleven Years of Being Wrong Most of the Time