| Sumario: | Middle powers today navigate great power rivalry not by hedging risk but by strategically leveraging this rivalry during positioning windows across competing institutional frameworks to extract concessions from the great powers, shape norms and secure their autonomy. This article introduces positional power as a dynamic and temporal concept that reframes middle power agency beyond the hedging and strategic autonomy scholarship by specifying temporal cycles and their phases through which this agency fluctuates. Opening phases enable competitive signalling and framework experimentation, peak phases generate maximal concession extraction through sustained bidding wars and closure phases impose exclusivity requirements that narrow positioning flexibility. Success depends on three scope conditions: sustained competitive balance between rival great power sponsors of frameworks, genuinely comparable institutional alternatives across policy domains and robust domestic coordination capacity to manage complex multi-directional relationships. Through a comparison of the digital governance and security architecture domains, the analysis reveals how middle powers exploit institutional rivalry dynamics differently across exclusionary and overlapping governance structures. This dynamic lens reframes international order as competitively institutionalized and temporally cyclical, offering actionable principles for middle powers seeking to harness rivalry between great powers, and reveals middle powers as co-authors within the normative international system.
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