Contested Hierarchy and Architectural Conversion: How Power Becomes System-Forming in International Politics

Why do substantial military, legal, institutional, or network capabilities sometimes reorganize international behaviour, while in other cases they generate only disruption, partial attainment, or counter-mobilization? Existing approaches identify capabilities, authority, network positions, and institutional change, but leave under-specified the causal assembly through which heterogeneous assets become executable and reproducible order-forming capacity. This article develops a middle-range causal framework centred on the mechanism of architectural conversion. Power becomes system-forming not through asset possession alone, but when a political claim is connected to functionally sufficient operators, activation procedures, direct-target and third-party responses, consolidation, and reproducible expectations. The framework separates harm from compliance, adaptation from recognition, mechanism repetition from outcome reproduction, and initiator attainment from field-level change. Structured comparison of five plausibility probes—Russia–Ukraine, Iran–Hormuz, China–Taiwan, GDPR, and WTO appellate review with the MPIA yields three findings. Material scale alone does not determine architectural outcome. Functional closure is specific to the claimed result: configurations sufficient for disruption or blockage may remain incomplete for governance or replacement. Direct targets and third parties may redirect initiating effects into substitution, segmentation, or counterarchitecture. The article defines system-forming power as the capacity of an actor or configuration to create, preserve, or change the reproducible conditions under which wider actors make decisions, gain access, recognize roles, and anticipate consequences.