Nonstate Actors

Realism and Transnationalism

From a realist perspective, nongovernmental bodies are always subject to state power in world politics. Hence, on a realist premise, business corporations cannot operate outside their base country except insofar as home and host states permit them to do so. Companies such as Coca-Cola, LUKOIL, and Microsoft would, on a realist understanding, always be subject to the full control of national governments. Likewise, for realists, civil society associations such as the human rights organization Amnesty International, the ecological lobby Greenpeace, and the religious movement Al Qaeda have no impact on world politics except when states allow it. Indeed, some realist analyses suggest that nonstate entities operate wholly and solely as tools of state policy. Thus, for example, a realist could argue that the humanitarian relief agency World Vision only acts inasmuch as it serves the interests of donor states in the Global North and recipient states in the Global South.

The realist (or “statist”) approach to action in world politics has never gained acceptance by all scholars. For example, from Karl Marx onward, historical materialists have maintained that states serve capital rather than the other way around and that workers need to unite across borders in order to achieve social transformation. Liberal internationalists, too, suggested already in the 19th and early 20th centuries that citizen movements (e.g., of feminists, pacifists, religious revivalists) could affect the course of interstate relations. In the 1920s and 1930s, political and sociological research on world affairs regularly considered nongovernmental as well as governmental actors.

Between the 1940s and the 1960s, however, most students of international relations took the realist position that nonstate actors play no autonomous role in world politics. In the context of World War II and the subsequent Cold War, it appeared—particularly to scholars in North America and Western Europe—that world affairs were reducible to state action. After all, entire societies were subordinated to state direction in World War II. Similarly, both sides in the Cold War marshaled their respective business sectors, mass media, political parties, and civil societies in the bipolar struggle.

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