Author’s Note

On the Origins of the New Helsinki School

Since 2022, I have chaired roundtables, moderated debates, and delivered lectures across regions, disciplines, and institutions. In doing so, I have encountered a striking pattern: a persistent set of questions, themes, and observations that consistently reappeared—across geographies, across professions, and across ideological divides.

They were rarely resolved. They tended to emerge toward the end of a session, just as time ran out. And because they remained open, they often reappeared—again and again—as if demanding structure.

Others began referring to them by name: the Helsinki Way, the Helsinki Doctrine, the Helsinki Approach, the Helsinki Theory, and increasingly, the Helsinki School. But these labels were not mine. They were attempts by others to give shape to a set of patterns they could not ignore.

What they were referring to was not a theory or a vision. It was a structure of recurring questions.

On closer inspection, these fragments began to reveal internal connections. They were not random. They pointed toward a coherent reordering of the questions we ask about power, sovereignty, capital, and strategy. They formed, in effect, a metatheoretical agenda.

This is not the first attempt to formalize it. A first Helsinki Geoeconomics Manifesto was discussed at a conference in Helsinki in 2023. It was never adopted. A limited, tentative version titled Towards a Manifesto was later published. This document is a second attempt. It is not final. It is not comprehensive. But it is bolder, clearer, and declared with intent.

This is the new manifesto. Not because the ideas are new—but because it is time they were made public.

I. Power as First Principle

The New Helsinki School begins from a single observation: human life is structured around the pursuit of power. This is not a metaphor. It is not a theory. It is a fact of social behavior. From family dynamics to statecraft, from markets to media, from tribal affiliation to algorithmic control, the underlying currency is power: the ability to influence others and resist being influenced.

Power, as social psychologists have long understood, is not a resource. It is a relationship. It emerges the moment two people enter a room. Who speaks first? Who listens? Who yields? This logic scales. It governs boardrooms, battlefields, and bureaucracies. It defines who sets the rules and who follows them.

We are not blank slates seeking happiness. We are agents seeking advantage. The promise of utility maximization has always rested on an illusion—that someone else has already secured the space in which optimization can occur. But who built that space? Who enforces it? Who is excluded from it? These are questions of power, not preference.

There is no benevolent sovereign who guarantees equal pursuit. There is only contested terrain. In that terrain, power is not the opposite of utility. It is its precondition.

II. Power Maximization as Economic Logic

Mainstream economics begins with the individual. It treats preferences as given, incentives as structuring, and outcomes as efficient when no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. This is the doctrine of Pareto optimality.

But power does not follow this logic. Power is not efficient in the Pareto sense—it does not aim to balance gains or avoid losses. It is hierarchical by nature. It escalates until asymmetry is achieved—until the ability to set outcomes rests in one party’s hands.

This is why the New Helsinki School posits power maximization—along with utility maximization—as the co-organizing principle of economic behavior. Wealth can grow without changing who decides. Power cannot. To gain power is to shift the field of decision-making. It is to author outcomes, not merely adapt to them.

This reframing does not deny the role of markets, incentives, or trade. It explains them. Contracts, currencies, and capital flows are not neutral instruments. They are infrastructures of influence. They allocate visibility, access, and constraint. They encode the victories of past power struggles and condition the next ones.

An economy is not an equilibrium. It is a battlefield.

III. The Three Pillars of Power

Power is not abstract. It has sources. We identify three:

• Human Force – the ability to coerce, constrain, and inflict harm. This is the domain of geopolitics, military strength, police authority, and kinetic threat.
• Human Ingenuity – the capacity to exploit resources, optimize production, and structure interdependence. This is the terrain of geoeconomics, industrial policy, technology, and finance.
• Human Story – the ability to craft narratives, shape perception, and legitimize action. This is the sphere of geointellectual power, cultural hegemony, legal authority, and ideological alignment.

These pillars are not sequential. They are simultaneous. Every exercise of power involves a mix of harm, incentive, and narrative. Every structure of dominance rests on control of some combination of these three.

States, firms, religions, and networks all draw on these pillars. What differs is the mix—and the mastery.

IV. Geography as Ground

All power is spatial. Force requires presence. Ingenuity requires infrastructure. Stories require dissemination.

This is why we speak of geopolitics, geoeconomics, and geointellect. The prefix matters. It reminds us that power is always grounded—in cables and corridors, in chokepoints and circuits, in jurisdictions and languages.

The illusion of a flat world has collapsed. The internet is no longer borderless. Supply chains are no longer apolitical. Currencies are no longer neutral. Geography has returned—not as a constraint, but as the operating system of global power.

V. Diversity Drives Hierarchy

Power is not evenly distributed. This is not a failure of justice. It is a feature of variation.

Where there is diversity in capabilities, orientation, and access to the three pillars of power, hierarchy emerges. Some can compel. Some can incentivize. Some can persuade. Few can do all three. Those who can rise to the top.

This is why the New Helsinki School rejects the fiction of symmetry. There are no truly equal actors. Not among states, not among firms, not among people. Even legal equality masks strategic inequality. Sovereignty on paper does not translate to sovereignty in fact.

The world is hierarchical because it is diverse. And because it is hierarchical, it is political.

VI. The Concentration of Power in a Global Age

Globalization was not the diffusion of power. It was its concentration.

The same forces that connected the world—technology, finance, trade—also created overlapping transnational hierarchies. Control of information flows, capital flows, and supply chains now rests in the hands of a few dominant actors.

Power has not been democratized. It has been consolidated. And it has moved away from the median human being.

VII. Technology and the Reversal of Empowerment

New technologies have expanded the capacity to:

• Inflict harm (cyber warfare, autonomous weapons)
• Exploit resources (data extraction, AI-driven optimization)
• Shape narratives (algorithmic persuasion, platform control)

But these capacities are no longer widely distributed. They are held by technology owners—not by the public, and not by states.

This marks a historic reversal. The rise of democratic modernity empowered the median person—as soldier, voter, worker, citizen. That trend is over.

Today, the individual is less powerful than at any time in the last two centuries:

• Politically disempowered by surveillance and information manipulation
• Economically disempowered by automation and platform dominance
• Intellectually disempowered by cognitive overload and narrative control

Meanwhile, the owners of infrastructure—physical and digital—have become strategic sovereigns. They are not constrained by borders. They are not accountable to electorates. And they are increasingly indispensable to the states that once claimed to rule them.

These technology owners are fewer in number than the states they engage. They are more aligned, more agile, and more strategically coherent. States are divided by rivalry and burdened by bureaucracy. Platforms are not. The result is asymmetry.

The power to govern now resides in code, not law.

VIII. The Post-State Horizon

The traditional state is no longer the apex of authority. It is a platform among others.

What we see emerging is a post-state configuration of power—where the tools of governance (surveillance, enforcement, legitimacy, extraction) are operated by non-state actors: corporations, networks, consortia, and sovereign capital holders.

Territory still matters. So does law. But they no longer organize the world.

The future belongs to those who control:

• The infrastructure of connectivity
• The logic of code and financial architecture
• The authority to frame reality and filter truth

This is not chaos. It is not collapse. It is reconfiguration.

The New Helsinki School provides the map.

IX. Strategic Horizon: Toward a Power-Centric Political Economy

The New Helsinki School does not offer a final theory. It initiates a reframing.

We begin from a single first principle: human beings seek power—to shape their world, to secure their survival, to influence others. Not wealth. Not utility. Not justice. These may follow—but power precedes.

In every domain—economic, legal, strategic—power is the co-organizing logic. It determines outcomes, structures preferences, and shapes the very language in which interests are expressed. The New Helsinki School does not moralize this. It maps it. We do not ask what ought to be done. We ask who decides what ought means—and how they gained that position.

This is a manifesto, not a manual. It is a call to re-center our analysis of economic and strategic behavior around power—its structures, sources, and spatial dynamics.

We identify three pillars of power:

• Force (human ability to inflict harm),
• Ingenuity (human capacity to exploit resources),
• Story (human need for narrative, legitimacy, belief).

We trace these through the geographic reality of power—because power is not abstract. It is grounded. It is always exercised somewhere, by someone, against others. Power is spatial.

We recognize that diversity produces hierarchy. When actors differ in capabilities and orientation to force, ingenuity, or narrative, power concentrates. Globalization and technology have not flattened the field—they’ve deepened the trenches.

Today, power is concentrating again. Technology owners, not states, now command the commanding heights. The geoeconomic infrastructure of the 21st century is being written in code—not law. Capital is sovereign, not because it floats above the state, but because it commands the state’s machinery through design, enforcement, and selective support.

In this landscape, the median individual has lost power—no longer a revolutionary, soldier, voter, or student, but a client of infrastructures they do not own, narratives they do not author, and decisions they do not shape.

This manifesto is a beginning. It is a challenge to a discipline that still chases equilibrium, optimization, and comparative advantage—concepts which describe no one’s actual experience of global order.

Helsinki Geoeconomics is the institutional platform to explore what comes next.

The School, the Society, the Institute—we are building a structure fit to confront the real architecture of power. Through this, we invite others—not to adopt our conclusions, but to enter the terrain. The strategic, moral, and disciplinary consequences of this reframing are immense. But we must begin with conceptual clarity.

Power is not a distortion of economics. Power is its foundation.

Let us rebuild on that ground.