Global Corporate Power’s Challenge to Order and Responsibility in World Politics

• In Event: Ethics in International Practice: The Politics of Responsibility and Obligation

Abstract

Multinational corporations have steadily assumed a greater share of global power vis-à-vis states. The ten largest non-financial corporations in the world had annual sales revenue exceeding $2.7 trillion in 2016, which was greater than the GDP of the bottom 135 states combined and the gross national expenditure of the bottom 114 states combined. Besides the concentration in economic resources, global corporate power also affects access to information, electoral outcomes, employment stability, income and wealth inequality, and environmental degradation, to name a few global ethical concerns. What is the future of state-centric responsibility in world politics given a concentration of global corporate power? While large multinational corporations are one of the more powerful global actors, IR investigations into corporate power remain underdeveloped. Meanwhile, outside IR, most discussions of corporate responsibility are centered on corporate governance or corporate social responsibility. This paper instead presents global corporate power as a world order and wrestles with its resulting challenge to responsibility in world politics. Specifically, it considers how global corporate power elides the ethical commitments designed for states. Divorcing power and order from state-centric approaches to responsibility allows a reimagining of global corporate ethics for more effective political reckonings.

Author

• Swati Srivastava, Purdue University