Business, Politics and Corporate Power

What this research covers

Business and peace research asks what firms do for societies in conflict. The papers gathered here ask the prior question of how much power firms hold over the governments and communities they operate in, and what limits it. The answers come from a county-month panel of United States data center restrictions, a synthetic survey of corporate professionals in high-risk settings, output and governance data for 23 charter cities and network state projects, caselets of social media platforms in Turkey, India and Myanmar, the personal and diplomatic relationships of a nineteenth-century Mexican caudillo, and a test of ten Marxist hypotheses against panel data for 183 countries.

Two threads connect them. The first is bargaining: who holds the credible threat when a firm and a government disagree, and how that changes when the people deciding want the firm to leave. The second is visibility: firms exercise most influence when public attention is low, and the papers trace what happens when attention arrives, whether through a council hearing, a polarized electorate or a regime that writes compliance into formally democratic law. The data center study is the newest and largest, matching 457 restrictions to 2,165 projects (Miklian 2026).

Data center resistance and local refusal

On 3 March 2026 the city council of Birmingham, Alabama approved a 180-day pause on new data center applications while letting the DC Blox expansion and the Nebius AI Factory, both already in permitting, proceed under the rules in force when they applied. Independence, Missouri did the same for the Nebius project under its review. By August 2026, governments in 348 American counties had adopted 457 restrictions on data centers since January 2017, 388 of them dated 2026. The paper matches those restrictions, from the Moratorium Nation inventory, to 2,165 data center projects assembled from Server Country, Compute Atlas, EPA permit records and Epoch AI.

Counties were most likely to adopt a first restriction in the announcement month and the five months after it: monthly adoption rose 1.75 percentage points in that window against 0.30 in months six to eleven and 0.38 from month twelve onward, across 321,054 county-months and 247 first adoptions. More than half of the adopting counties, 193 of 348, had no project in the inventory at all. Restrictions also spread between counties where the same opposition group was recorded, including counties sharing no border: 12 of the 14 adoption events that followed a connected county's adoption crossed a gap between counties. Projects in counties that restricted within six months of announcement were 9.46 percentage points less likely to have started construction by August 2026 (15 of 94 against 371 of 778), and where the county acted before any recorded opposition the gap was 20.97 points.

Corporate silence and quiet politics

The Quiet and the Compliant presents a synthetic survey of 400 corporate professionals who implement social initiatives in fragile and conflict-affected settings, and tests seven hypotheses on how regulatory environments, political polarization, sector and organizational structure shape corporate social engagement. European professionals report higher strategic integration of social impact on every measured dimension than their US peers. US professionals overwhelmingly report that polarization hinders social initiatives, yet that perception does not predict unreported social activity, which complicates the quiet CSR story. Professionals in extractive industries report both the highest operational preparedness and the highest awareness of complicity, a pattern the paper names presence-dependent reflexivity (ScienceOpen Preprints, DOI 10.14293/PR2199.003230.v2).

Has Your Company Gone Quiet, or Just Given Up?, by Jason Miklian, John E. Katsos, Harry J. Van Buren III, Angelika Rettberg and Sarah Cechvala, was posted to SSRN on 28 August 2026 as abstract 7347858 (DOI 10.2139/ssrn.7347858). The abstract, keywords and citation record are on its page on this site.

Sovereignty for sale: charter cities and network states

Across 23 jurisdictions between 2015 and 2024, charter cities averaged 2.3 percentage points higher GDP growth than their host regions, while network state-affiliated projects showed wide variance, with the successes concentrated in financial services and software where jurisdictional arbitrage pays. Both models score poorly on participatory governance, and network state projects score lower still because of token-weighted structures. Elite capture is prevalent, local community voice is marginalized, and the win-win language of promotional materials bears little resemblance to the observed power asymmetries. The paper closes with the regulatory safeguards that would change the distribution: binding community consent mechanisms, participation rights, and exit provisions that protect communities as well as investors (Miklian 2026).

Platforms in hybrid regimes

Hybrid regimes keep formally democratic legal frameworks and undermine them through executive overreach and selective enforcement. Using a four-part taxonomy of government platform measures, content control, surveillance, propaganda dissemination and democratic façade maintenance, and caselets of Turkey (2016 to 2024), India (2019 to 2025) and Myanmar (2011 to 2024), the paper shows how these regimes deploy all four at once through mechanisms that set them apart from fully authoritarian digital governance. Platforms comply in exchange for market access, a trade the paper calls digital obedience taxation, and the revenue at stake is large: Meta's revenues exceeded $164.5 billion in 2024 (Miklian, Cechvala and Katsos 2026).

Business, politics and patriotism in nineteenth-century Mexico

Santa Anna's periods of rule helped bring Mexico its independence, lost the country nearly half of its territory and shaped its later ideas of what a leader should be. Farías and Miklian assess his key personal and diplomatic relationships with foreign nationals during the formative 1829 to 1847 period, show how those relationships influenced Mexico's international relations, and trace how his caudillo leadership style carried into Mexico's nation-building. The article appeared in the International History Review in 2023 (DOI 10.1080/07075332.2023.2289906).

Testing Marx against twenty-first-century data

The paper translates ten of Marx's most influential hypotheses into falsifiable specifications and estimates them against data from the Penn World Tables, World Development Indicators, SWIID, ACLED, V-Dem, MARPOR and the American Time Use Survey, covering 183 countries from 2000 to 2019. Rising exploitation, labor's falling share, unemployment disciplining wages and automation generating alienation all hold, with economic diagnoses scoring a mean of .516. The political predictions, that immiseration produces class consciousness, that the state acts as a direct instrument of capital, and that structural crises generate revolutionary mobilization, score .300; rising inequality does not predict left-wing voting in cross-country panels, and a gig platform regression discontinuity confirms the reserve army wage discipline mechanism (Miklian 2026).

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