Corporations Writing the Rules of the New World Order
The questions that have been asked in the last century by scholars of international studies are “who runs the world,” and the simple answer has also been the great powers. Great powers shaped the world through drawing borders, enacting treaties, and setting the terms of trade, which allow corporations to operate from inside the order and not above it. This assumption is no longer quite true. The role of states is transforming, as their powers are being negotiated, shared, and integrated into corporate governance.
Across continents and industries, a handful of private companies have become powerful enough to shape the policies of states that were supposed to regulate them. The argument is that these corporate conglomerates have acquired geopolitical sovereign rights of their own, and this policy write-up demonstrates how different private and public companies make this case with rational clarity.
As of mid-December 2025, 9,357 Starlink satellites were in orbit, and by 2026 the constellation comprised roughly ten thousand low Earth orbit satellites, accounting for approximately seventy percent of all satellites currently in orbit. This is a dominant position with no real substitutable competitor, and one with strong ties to the United States.
When SpaceX faced competition from Amazon's Project Kuiper (another U.S.-linked company), Musk leveraged his personal influence over U.S. foreign aid and diplomacy, and by extension U.S. tariff policy, to pressure other states to approve Starlink licenses. This demonstrates that FDI and policy interdependence are explicitly connected to shaping the trajectory of the emerging order.
Once member states of international society align themselves with a particular company, they integrate corporate power into state policy affairs and frameworks, which produces polycentric world ordering through policy bargaining, lobbying, and leverage. Pushback has occurred especially among African States such as Cameroon, Namibia, and South Africa, which placed regulatory restrictions on Starlink in 2024, citing national security and antitrust concerns as a reason to resist the Starlink corporate power diffusion, and Taiwan has resisted the service over distrust of Musk's comments on Beijing power politics.
However, elsewhere, states' resistance is reportedly crumbling, as government officials increasingly seek to capture the economic benefits of Musk's companies rather than block them, particularly since Musk's political proximity to a head of state (Trump) raised the diplomatic cost of refusal.
State dependency on firms like Palantir is also shifting power away from states in the domains of financial revenue returns, information governance, and data access. As of 2025, about fifty-four percent of Palantir's financial revenue came from governmental contracts, secured by a $10 billion, ten-year Enterprise Agreement with the U.S. government signed in July 2025, which consolidated several previous technology-driven innovation contracts into a single arrangement.
The U.S. federal obligations and financial incentives to Palantir reached $970.5 million in 2025 and exceeded $1 billion in the 2026 fiscal year, with cumulative historical federal awards exceeding $1.9 billion directed towards defense capabilities and software. By systematically controlling the informational infrastructure that connects IRS, ICE, Treasury, and Pentagon data systems, Palantir has become a functional connective layer across the state apparatus; critics argue this creates practical power lock-in that allows Palantir to have asymmetric power leverage over the state.
Hence, this suggests the emerging world order is not shaped solely by multipolarity among states, but also by the institutionalization of a coalition of state-tied corporate hegemons controlling critical economic, security, and infrastructural sectors.
BlackRock's Global Head of Emerging Markets Debt, Amer Bisat, decided to leave in February 2025 to become Minister of Economy and Trade in Lebanon during the country's ongoing political and economic crisis. This reveals a pattern of private-state governance intersection; judging from this case, a corporate executive transitioned into a state’s top economic policymaking role at the precise moment when the state needed to manage its affairs with the international capital market.
This exemplifies how corporate expertise becomes state government and overlaps in governmentality functions. Hence, suggesting that the emerging world order is shaped not only by state actors, but by corporate expertise and private capital power projection, which creates a form of international political legitimacy for quasi-governmental enterprise.
Now considering the Dangote Group, which sphere of influence is more regional than global, and is genuinely altering the relative power of states in West Africa. A conglomerate of companies in cement, fertilizer, and, as of February 2026, the Dangote refinery produces 650,000 oil barrels per day. Aliko Dangote has managed to acquire a political influence and capacity that no Nigerian government official can offer.
The Dangote refinery reduced Nigeria's dependence on petrol imports and helped raise the country’s gross foreign exchange reserves from $33 billion in 2023 to $50 billion by early March 2026. This means a single private company's infrastructure decision improves a core macroeconomic indicator of the Nigerian state, hence altering the power calculation of the government. Dangote's refinery exists largely because of government concessions, exceptional financial capacity, political access, and a willingness to absorb risks that public institutions would ordinarily be expected to mitigate; such projects appear viable in Nigeria only at massive scale and with extraordinary political leverage.
Combined with buy-in from neighboring states and refinery expansion into markets such as Kenya, this illustrates a corporate polycentric order in which state autonomy is constrained by economic mechanisms such as outsourced capacity and mutual interest.
The emerging order is one of shared power between states and a diverse set of corporate hegemons, in which corporate agency is embedded directly in states' calculations of power, and alliances are shifting toward cooperation and not only with institutions. This does not mean that corporations will replace states; however, there is a convergence in the structural operation of power between states and corporate geopolitical actors.
Since states can't operate in isolation, their continuity and perpetuality are increasingly dependent on integrating the corporate hegemonic paradigm into world ordering. The question that remains unanswered is whether institutional agencies tasked with supervising corporations can adequately check their powers.
This article written by Chiemena Onyeobia, Research Assistant, Old Dominion University.
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