Transnational actors have qualitatively transformed the world by the way of their fresh insights and actions. Illustrate your answer with suitable examples. (2013, 2025, 15 Marks)
Transnational actors operate across state boundaries and influence world politics without acting for any government. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr. (Transnational Relations and World Politics, 1972) showed that such interactions were large, growing and consequential. The claim of qualitative change holds if it means they altered what states must do, not that they displaced the state.
An old actor at a new scale
The English East India Company raised armies, coined money and, after the Diwani of 1765, governed Bengal; its opium trade drew Britain into war with Qing China. Corporate power over states is old; what is new is the number, speed and reach of such actors.
Fresh insights: changing what states believe
- Norm entrepreneurs: the International Campaign to Ban Landmines bypassed the Conference on Disarmament to produce the Ottawa Treaty (1997); ICAN drove the TPNW (in force 2021). Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) model this as a norm life cycle of emergence, cascade and internalisation.
- Norm localisation: Amitav Acharya (2004) showed that Asian states adopt outside norms only after reworking them to fit local beliefs, so the Global South edits as well as receives.
- Epistemic communities (Peter M. Haas): scientists made the CFC–ozone link settled knowledge, enabling the Montreal Protocol (1987).
- The boomerang (Margaret E. Keck and Sikkink): Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, blocked at home, mobilised rights networks abroad until pressure returned on the junta.
Fresh actions: changing what states can do
- MNCs hold structural power: Charles E. Lindblom’s “privileged position of business” disciplines tax and labour policy without lobbying. After Rana Plaza (2013), the binding Bangladesh Accord was a pact between brands and unions, not a state law.
- Platforms govern speech and infrastructure: Starlink’s owner refused to extend coverage for a Ukrainian strike at Sevastopol (2022); WhatsApp (2021) and X challenged Indian content rules, and the Karnataka High Court upheld the Sahyog portal against X on 24 September 2025.
- Diasporas lobby host governments and finance homelands: India, the top recipient since 2008, received $135.46 billion in remittances in 2024–25.
- Violent networks: 9/11 reorganised global security; such groups hold nothing at risk, so deterrence fails. The Taliban went from insurgency to de facto government.
The limits of the claim
- Kenneth N. Waltz replies that firms and NGOs act within a system whose units remain states.
- Norms unravel: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Poland left the Ottawa Treaty between December 2025 and February 2026, and no nuclear-armed state has joined the TPNW.
- Marxist and post-colonial critics see MNCs and Northern NGOs as carriers of Western capital and values.
- States push back: India’s FCRA amendments (2020), the EU’s Digital Services Act, and the US dismantling of USAID (2025), which cut NGO funding worldwide.
Conclusion
The change is qualitative in a precise sense: transnational actors have become driving forces that rewrite the agenda, norms and instruments of world politics, turning a state-centric game into a pluralist one. The state is reconfigured, not retired. Firms and civil society can be steered by regulation; violent networks must be denied space altogether.