Contemporary technology oligarchs are reshaping global power through their control over critical infrastructures, political institutions, and ideas. Across six essays, this forum examines the territorial, temporal, and ideational ambitions of Silicon Valley billionaires, highlighting how individuals like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg exercise unprecedented influence over states and societies. From charter cities and network-states to cloud computing and satellite systems, these oligarchs leverage personal wealth, technological mastery, and monopolistic control to bypass traditional state authority, turning themselves into quasi-sovereign actors. The essays situate these developments within historical and theoretical frameworks, comparing oligarchic power to early modern chartered corporations and the logic of state formation, while emphasizing the novel dimensions of control unique to the 21st century. Collectively, the essays demonstrate how individual technology oligarchs consolidate authority in ways that challenge traditional international relations theory, revealing a global order increasingly shaped by the ambitions and delusions of private actors.

Technology is of increasing importance for international cooperation, yet theory development in rationalist International Relations has not kept pace. I develop a theoretical framework for explaining cooperative outcomes in the international regulation of technology. I propose that uncertainty and the distribution of material capacities create a severe international collective action problem for novel technologies, which precludes robust cooperative outcomes and thus limits joint gains from the appropriation of technological benefits and from the mitigation of technological risks. While the severity of the collective action problem attenuates over time, in principle enabling greater ambition in cooperative outcomes, sociotechnical lock-in reduces the capacities and incentives of state actors to deviate from pre-existing rules. This leads to incremental change whereby rules harden over time but do not change significantly in terms of their regulatory substance. While early regulatory interventions are hampered by collective action problems, late interventions are constrained by lock-in. These temporal dynamics create a tendency towards systemic inefficiency in international technology regulation. I illustrate this argument using the cases of nuclear power and synthetic biology.

The involvement of private actors in global policymaking has received significant scholarly attention in IR. Existing accounts have shown how entities such as corporations, businesses, and philanthropies build their authority to become legitimate actors and shape global politics. This paper argues that contemporary global dynamics, such as the financialisation of development and the rise of multistakeholderism, have ushered in a trend where private actors are not only seen as legitimate delegated authorities but also embraced as fully fledged political equals indispensable for addressing societal problems. To understand this shift, it is necessary to move beyond an examination of legitimation strategies to interrogate, instead, how private actors shape what are seen as ‘apt’ or ‘deviant’ ways of knowing and acting upon problems. Through an examination of what I call ‘political normalisation’ in the field of global food governance, I show how through concrete practices – individualising social problems, defining institutional aptness, and cultivating the landscape – private actors not only cultivate a perception of themselves as rightful global governors but also shape the parameters of what rightful governing ought to be. More broadly, this shift invites us to further complicate the public–private divide and assess the novel ways through which private actors ‘do’ politics.

States increasingly confront security threats from exiled economic elites who retain power through offshore wealth, political influence, and informational leverage. This paper introduces the concept of weaponised legal dependence to explain why and how states file commercial lawsuits against their own citizens in foreign courts – particularly in global legal hubs like London – to neutralise these transnational plutocratic threats. While conventional tools of transnational repression (e.g., extradition, abduction, information warfare) target dissidents’ legitimacy or messaging power, only foreign litigation can directly constrain the material assets that underpin a plutocrat’s influence. However, initiating extraterritorial claims is costly, risky, and entails a partial surrender of sovereignty to liberal jurisdictions. I argue that states resort to these legal strategies when they face power parity with plutocrats – situations where neither side has hierarchical control, prompting political conflict to spill into foreign legal systems under the guise of commercial dispute. Drawing on 60 interviews with legal practitioners and case studies from Russia and Kazakhstan, this paper shows how states instrumentalise the credibility of liberal legal institutions to reclaim offshore assets and delegitimise their rivals. In doing so, illiberal regimes exploit liberal infrastructure, turning courts meant to enforce commercial norms into battlegrounds of domestic power politics.

This article proposes a theoretical framework for explaining the motivations behind the early adoption of international public policy innovations. While there has been a proliferation of transnational policy diffusion studies, there is less research on why some governments become early adopters when new international policy norms are promoted. Most research on the topic looks only at monocausal explanations without considering their interactions in a coherent, integrated framework. The article proposes four motivations for early adoption: normative, reputation, competition, and locking-in. The framework is then illustrated by application to the early adoption of business and human rights policy innovations, with Colombia and Ecuador serving as two cases for comparative analysis. The article advances understanding of early adoption and policy diffusion by highlighting particularly important explanations for what motivates early adopters to begin processes of subsequent diffusion and suggesting how motivations may interact to strengthen the case for early adoption.

This article contends that investigating relationalities between business continuity management (BCM), staff behaviours, and bureaucratic resilience advances understandings of the survival of international organisations (IOs). Drawing on in-depth interviews, a global staff survey, and a discourse analysis of United Nations (UN) reports and applying a post-colonial feminist theoretical approach foregrounding care ethics to the study of IOs, the article examines how the UN Secretary-General’s Alternative Working Arrangements directive to close physical offices and open ‘virtual offices’ was implemented in the first 18 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is contended that BCM is necessary for IO survival, since if the IO bureaucracy is unable to be productive and maintain its spheres of influence during a crisis, it risks losing power and authority. Between March 2020 and August 2021, staff facilitated IO survival organically, from the bottom up, in four ways: demonstrating good performance and productivity; being adaptable and resilient; maintaining personal spheres of influence; and building communities of care within the UN. However, the UN’s neoliberal, technocratic approach to business continuity and bureaucratic resilience-building neglected staff care needs. Consequently, IO survival is predicated on staff performing as exploited gendered and racialised ‘neoliberal subjects’, revealing a chronic structural crisis rooted in the UN bureaucracy’s hierarchical composition and unequal employment regime.

How do authoritarian actors navigate the liberal international order, adopting democratic facades without committing to democratic principles? And why is it so difficult for the international normative system to debunk their pretence when it comes to the use of democratic values? This paper explores this question by introducing ‘profilicity’ and ‘performativity’ as key concepts to understand how autocratic regimes build powerful profiles within a liberal system that values authenticity. Unlike conventional theories, which assume that engagement with liberal norms requires genuine commitment, profilicity reveals that strategic image-building can be just as effective. Through this lens, we see how autocracies exploit liberalism’s own ideals, using performative adaptation to secure status and reshape norms. This paper suggests that the liberal order’s emphasis on sincerity may itself be a strategic weakness, one that autocratic actors skilfully navigate in a world increasingly driven by profiles over principles.

Structural changes like globalisation and technical change have empowered business actors in global governance. Yet to become leaders of global governance rather than mere participants, business actors need to legitimise themselves as working for the public good rather than for the maximisation of profit alone. This paper argues that business power becomes authority through the gradual diffusion of ideals of global governance that legitimate the leadership of business actors. We use the concepts of cultural capital and symbolic capital developed by Pierre Bourdieu to conceptualise the construction of business authority. However, we also expand on existing Bourdieusian accounts, which focus on authority construction within fields, by showing how business actors leverage globalisation and technical change to frame discourses that construct their authority across fields of governance. To demonstrate this, we focus on the case of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has accumulated enough cultural capital to deploy two particularly influential discourses – multistakeholderism and the 4th Industrial Revolution. We show that, by making sense of complex situations, these discourses functioned as symbolic capital and legitimised both the WEF’s own authority and that of business actors more broadly.

Independent experts are routinely appointed by international organisations for specific short-term assignments. Existing scholarship has studied their career trajectories, accumulation of resources, and mobility across occupational settings to explain their power and capacity to pursue their own agendas. However, it has neglected the fact that many transnational professionals not only move between professions but also practise them simultaneously. By using the example of the United Nations special rapporteur, an independent human rights expert, this article addresses this under-theorised feature by theorising them as plural professionals, or actors who practise multiple professions simultaneously. This multiple positioning in several professional settings at once can create tensions in how they approach their work. But, as I argue, it is also the source of their expert independence, rooted in a transnational social space connecting multiple professional identities, resources, and skills. Independence viewed through this lens is a socio-historical category which is made up of the combination of professional, biographical, and institutional resources as embodied and strategically mobilised by plural professionals. This argument builds on my original dataset of the professional biographies of 122 thematic special rapporteurs and 30 biographical interviews.

Who is held responsible when international organisations (IOs) fall short of public expectations? Scholarship on IO blame avoidance assumes that member states can hide behind IOs. As clarity of responsibility is assumed to be lacking in IOs, public responsibility attributions (PRA) will usually target the IO rather than individual member states. We argue, by contrast, that even in complex IOs such as the European Union (EU), clarity of responsibility is not always lacking. Therefore, whether the IO in general or individual member states become the main target of public blame attributions depends on the type of IO policy failure. In cases of failures to act and failures to comply, the responsibility of individual member states is comparatively easy to identify, and they thus become the main blame target. Only in cases of failures to perform clarity of responsibility is lacking, and the IO will become the main target of public blame attributions. To assess the plausibility of this‘failure hypothesis’, we study public blame attributions in two cases of EU foreign policy failures and two cases of EU environmental policy failures.

This article addresses critical gaps in the literature on crisis-driven policy change in international organisations. While existing studies focus on elite decision-making and institutional resilience, the role of frontline crisis managers remains under-explored in International Relations. Using the European migration and refugee crisis as a case study and drawing on insights from organisation studies and the sociology of the professions, the article introduces a novel theoretical framework that foregrounds improvisation by first responders and the ex-post stabilisation of their spontaneous policy solutions at headquarters. In addition to reconstructing and illustrating the mechanisms that link frontline action to changed policies, the article identifies theoretical conditions shaping the likelihood and direction of informal policy change from the ground up. By highlighting bottom-up dynamics in crises, it not only advances theoretical debates on crisis politics, but also proposes a new research agenda for analysing the transformative role of field-level practices in global politics.