Original
Corporate Quasi‐Sovereignty: Big Tech and the Politics of Sovereign Authority in the Digital Age
Abstract
ABSTRACT As private technology firms expand their control over critical infrastructures, questions of sovereignty and governance are increasingly displaced from states to corporate actors. Existing scholarship on sovereignty assumes that authority is either monopolized by states or shared through institutionalized public–private arrangements. Yet, recent events, including SpaceX's control of wartime communications in Ukraine, Meta's confrontation with the Australian government, and OpenAI's attempts to shape global AI regulation, demonstrate that firms can exercise discretionary authority without formal delegation, legal accountability, or democratic oversight. This study introduces the concept of Corporate Quasi‐Sovereignty (CQS) to theorize how certain technology firms function as de facto sovereign actors. CQS is defined by the convergence of three enabling dimensions: infrastructural command, executive autonomy, and normative or geopolitical assertion. Drawing on Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), this paper theorizes ‘sovereignty windows’ as the mechanism through which firms internally collapse the problem, policy, and politics streams, enabling unilateral interventions with geopolitical consequences. ‘Stream collapse,’ the internalization of all three MSF streams within a single corporate hierarchy, is operationalized as a boundary condition of MSF, distinct from conventional stream coupling. The ‘conditional policy entrepreneur’ is introduced as the corporate analogue to Kingdon's entrepreneur: a founder‐CEO who exercises this role only when all three CQS enabling conditions simultaneously converge. Drawing on comparative case analyses of Meta, SpaceX, and OpenAI, the article shows how CQS captures both reactive and anticipatory modes of corporate authority, showing that firms now operate as both market actors and quasi‐sovereign agents capable of substituting, bypassing, or preempting state power.
中文
企业准主权：大型科技公司与数字时代的主权权威政治
摘要
摘要：随着私营技术企业不断扩大对关键基础设施的控制，主权与治理问题正日益从国家转移至企业行为体。现有关于主权的研究假定，权威要么由国家垄断，要么通过制度化的公私安排予以分享。然而，近期事件——包括SpaceX对乌克兰战时通信的控制、Meta与澳大利亚政府的对抗，以及OpenAI试图塑造全球人工智能监管——表明企业能够在没有正式授权、法律问责或民主监督的情况下行使自由裁量权。本研究提出“企业准主权”（Corporate Quasi-Sovereignty, CQS）概念，以理论化某些技术企业如何作为事实上的主权行为体运作。CQS由三个赋能维度的汇合界定：基础设施支配、行政自主，以及规范或地缘政治主张。借鉴金登的多源流框架（MSF），本文将“主权之窗”理论化为一种机制：企业通过该机制在内部使问题流、政策流与政治流坍缩，从而得以实施具有地缘政治后果的单边干预。“流坍缩”，即三大MSF源流在单一企业等级体系内部的内部化，被操作化为MSF的一项边界条件，区别于常规的源流耦合。本文提出“有条件政策企业家”作为金登式企业家的企业对应物：一位创始人兼首席执行官仅当三项CQS赋能条件同时汇合时才行使这一角色。基于对Meta、SpaceX和OpenAI的比较案例研究，本文展示CQS如何捕捉企业权威的反应性与预期性模式，表明企业如今既作为市场行为体，也作为能够替代、绕过或先发制人于国家权力的准主权代理人运作。
关键词
企业准主权、大型科技公司、数字主权、主权权威、多源流框架、政策企业家、人工智能监管、地缘政治