Anarchy Is What Companies Make of It
Countries operate without authority above them, formally equal as sovereigns yet substantively unequal in power and capacity. This is a core concept when thinking about enterprise geopolitics.
Among the countries of the world, there is what many international relations scholars call an anarchic system—one without a central authority capable of enforcing rules consistently. For decades, companies operated as if this condition applied only to states.
That assumption no longer holds.
As the post-World War Two and post-Cold War arrangements that once mediated geopolitical risk weaken, firms are increasingly exposed directly to the realities of an anarchic international system. Sanctions, industrial policy, regulatory fragmentation, geopolitical alignment pressures, and conflict now shape core business decisions, not merely background conditions.
Crucially, these pressures do not point in a single direction.
Different states now advance different—and often incompatible—expectations of corporate behavior, reflecting divergent strategic priorities and resurgent mercantilist instincts.
The implication is not that companies have become states.
It is that they have become actors navigating a system of competing demands.
Anarchy is not chaos—and it is not destiny
In international relations, anarchy does not mean disorder. It means the absence of a central enforcer. What happens under anarchy depends on how actors interpret one another, form expectations, and structure their interactions; this insight is usually applied to states. But it travels remarkably well to the corporate world.
Anarchy does not impose a single logic on companies.
It creates a condition in which organizational choices matter more, precisely because external expectations diverge.
Firms have long benefited from a constructed order
For much of the past seventy years, companies operated within a particular construction of international order. Institutions, alliances, trade regimes, and shared norms created relatively stable expectations. Political risk existed, but it was often buffered—absorbed by states, managed through law, or priced by markets.
In that environment, it made sense for firms to treat geopolitics as external context rather than a domain of management, a realm where they had much agency.
What is changing is not the existence of anarchy, but the erosion of the constructions that once coordinated expectations across states.
As these give way to something less settled, governments increasingly ask different things of the same firm: local production here, market exit there; political alignment in one jurisdiction, strict neutrality in another; resilience over efficiency—or efficiency over resilience—depending on domestic political imperatives.
Companies can no longer rely on a shared international framework to reconcile these demands on their behalf.
Agency has moved inside the enterprise
In an anarchic system, outcomes are shaped through interaction rather than instruction. For companies, this means that geopolitical outcomes are mediated by internal decisions:
how risks and opportunities are framed
how conflicting state expectations are weighed
who owns geopolitical judgment
how uncertainty is escalated
and which strategic options are preserved or foreclosed
Two firms can face the same external environment—and even the same set of government pressures—yet experience very different outcomes. The difference lies not in the system itself, but in how each firm interprets, prioritizes, and responds to competing demands.
This is where insights from international political economy matter. In the absence of a single global authority, firms help create order through contracts, standards, supply chains, finance, and compliance regimes. Private authority expands precisely because public authority is fragmented—and because states increasingly seek to shape corporate behavior through indirect means.
In other words, companies are not just exposed to anarchy.
They participate in shaping how it is lived.
From awareness to ownership
Much contemporary corporate discussion of geopolitics still stops at awareness. Better scanning. Better scenarios. Better expert input. All of this has value—but it does not resolve the core issue.
Insight does not make decisions.
Organizations do.
The practical challenge of anarchy is therefore not analytical but managerial: who inside the firm owns geopolitical judgment when different countries demand different—and sometimes incompatible—courses of action?
Without clear ownership, geopolitics becomes episodic—visible in crises, invisible in planning. Responsibility fragments across functions. Decisions default to caution, delay, or lowest-common-denominator compliance.
In an anarchic system, that is not neutrality.
It is exposure.
The fiduciary dimension
Recognizing corporate agency under anarchy is not an invitation to overreach. It is a recognition of fiduciary reality.
Geopolitical factors now materially shape long-term value, resilience, and license to operate. Acting prudently often requires taking a broader view of stakeholders—not as a moral add-on, but as a practical necessity when firms are embedded in multiple political economies with distinct expectations.
This is not about predicting the future or controlling outcomes.
It is about governing how the organization responds when no single set of rules reconciles competing national demands.
Anarchy, rediscovered
Anarchy has always been the condition above the nation-state. What has changed is the extent to which companies can pretend they are insulated from it.
As familiar governance arrangements give way, firms are being forced to rediscover a lesson long familiar to states: there is no referee—only judgment, learning, and choice.
In a world of diverging national priorities and renewed mercantilism, corporate outcomes are shaped less by global rules than by how firms navigate conflicting pressures across jurisdictions.
Anarchy does not determine corporate fate on its own.
Companies do—through how they see, decide, and act.
Anarchy, increasingly, is what companies make of it