The second in Quaker peace theorist and economist Kenneth Boulding’s “three faces of power,” Exchange Power says: ‘I will give you Y, if you perform or yield X.’ Exchange Power comes into play in most of our every-day actions, for example, economic transactions. Exchange Power may or may not be coercive, so in terms of violence it can be positioned between Boulding’s two other forces of 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 drop the issue for the present time.

See also:
Threat Power
Integrative Power