Lauren Barden-Hair is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department studying International Relations and Comparative Politics.
My research targets international influences on the domestic sphere, specifically how states use indirect means to meddle in other countries. My dissertation focuses on new evidence showing that multinational corporations (MNCs) regularly accept state requests to become instruments of foreign security policy. These requests are not limited to domestic-based firms: in many cases, states are also able to achieve instrumentalization of foreign firms. The prevalence of these incidents suggests previous theories about state and MNC dynamics are incomplete. Drawing from findings in economic sociology and regional scholarship on East Asia, I propose that personal relationships with CEOs and financial leverage provide key explanations for firm instrumentalization. I test these claims by assessing repeated state requests across the near-universe of news firms in the United States and Taiwan. The project also presents suggestive analysis on how different regimes conduct firm instrumentalization, concluding that both autocracies and democracies frequently engage in firm instrumentalization, but they use different means to achieve it. My findings have significant implications for scholarship on non-state actors, security and globalization, firm decision making and the role of regime type in foreign policy.
