The power budget

Abstract

When reconsidering our behavior in a conflict situation, we take into account all the parallel conflicts we face in various arenas. This reconsideration allows us to safeguard and maximize our gains from the full range of our relationships, rather than from a single field. As such, this chapter focuses on:

• The different levels of significance between parallel conflict fields.

• The cost of conflict — which depends upon the significance of the particular conflict field

• Conflict ability — which refers to the availability of our power resources, considering their distribution to parallel conflicts.

In this way, we can build our power budget, which further promotes the development of an overall strategy. This strategy prescribes the extent of our intervention in each of our parallel conflicts. This chapter also discusses the flexibility of transferring power resources from one field to another, the symbolic participation in a field, as well as the concept of achieving synergies (2 + 2 = 5).