A Theory of Non-state Actors

The literature on non-state actors (NSAs) shows signs of a consensus around the fact that NSAs can be significant in shaping International Relations (IR) in various ways; that IR scholars should be interested in them as the “significant Others” of IR mostly for that very reason; that NSAs have become more numerous as well as more significant toward the end of the Cold War and since; that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), business groups, and Violent Non-State Actors (VNSAs) are all important categories of NSAs to consider; and that NSAs cannot be defined as purely “non-state” due to the various important links that tie most of them to state actors at least to some extent. With a view to the purposes of the present volume, this chapter seeks to advance beyond this baseline in several ways. It defines both NSAs’ agency and its impact as differentially contingent, conceptualizing NSAs as plausible sites of political agency and highly probable sites of domain-specific agency. It revaluates the analytical significance of NSA-to-state links by showing that most related arguments have been considered in a one-sided way as in fact NSAs also regulate, fund, co-govern with, enable, and occasionally disable states. A model of NSA emergence and persistence is presented, with reference to seven factors—four on the side of individuals as agents, and three as regards societal-institutional structures. NSAs are categorized refining existing approaches by using the actual essential characteristics of their domain of activity as the organizing principle for this purpose, rather than thinking broadly and vaguely of “political,” “economic,” “cultural” and “societal” organizations. Finally, a novel research agenda is proposed, encouraging a focus on NSAs’ ecological relationships within inter-organizational eco-systems.