A presentation by Dr Maha Rafi Atal(University of Glasgow). This event is part of the Digital Governance Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for Digital Governance.
This research colloquium features a book talk on When Companies Rule: Corporate Power from the East India Company to Silicon Valley (forthcoming, Columbia University Press, 2026). The political power of corporations today is often theorised as a product of state weakness. Neoliberalism has rolled back regulatory capacity, while globalisation has unleashed corporations into a transnational realm where no one state has jurisdiction. Corporations govern, so the story runs, in the gaps these changes create, shaping society to serve profit-seeking interests. This story, however, is a flawed one in two respects. First, corporate political power today is as much an ideological as a functional project, shaped by the moral vision that corporate actors have of an ideal society, a vision that is both richer and more idiosyncratic than mere neoliberalism would suggest. Moreover, people subject to corporate political control—whether in industrial enclaves or on the futuristic campuses of digital platforms—respond to it in ideological as well as material terms. Second, the “governance gap” account of corporate power overstates the novelty of contemporary private governance, and underplays the historical continuity of corporations’ status as public and political actors who long predate the modern state. As a result, efforts to curtail corporate power focus on reasserting the public regulatory authority of individual nation-states and restoring corporations to a private, economic realm. In fact, this lecture will argue, a more normative and historicized account of corporate power points to prospects for holding it accountable as a public authority at a transnational level.
Dr Maha Rafi Atal is an academic researcher working at the intersection of business and international affairs, focusing on how multinational corporations acquire political power, how they exercise it, and how they can be held accountable. She is the Adam Smith Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Political Economy at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Maha is also an award-winning business journalist, and the co-founder and Executive Director of Public Business, a nonprofit supporting reporting, research and discussion about the wider impact of business actions.
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