As Bangladesh’s interim government signed away its ports and energy infrastructure ahead of stalled elections, and Washington courted Venezuela’s oil reserves within weeks of unseating Maduro, a single uncomfortable question emerges: are States still acting like States or have they started behaving like corporations chasing market share? 

At times, history seems deceptively busy with wars, market fluctuations and grand proclamations of world leaders and yet beneath this restless surface a slow, structural transformation continues their patient work. 

Similar to rivers altering their course after decades of patient erosion, States too occasionally begin to behave in ways once thought alien to their very nature. 

The first half of this decade has perturbed more than just geopolitical alignments or economic forecasts; it has quietly exposed the structural limits of global power. Seemingly disconnected crises – wars, supply-chain breakdowns, energy insecurity, resource competition – are increasingly linked by a common logic. 

Same Expansionary Logic

Many theories articulated towards the end of the previous century now appear less as academic abstractions and more as delayed diagnoses of our contemporary condition, with direct implications for how power, resources, and welfare are governed today. Yet paradoxically, at a time when information flows faster and wider than ever before, it has also deepened asymmetries in collective understanding. Communication has expanded yet clarity has not.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish where the strategic behaviour of global corporations ends and that of nation-states begins. Historically distinct yet deeply interdependent, both appear to be converging on the same expansionary grammar. What we are witnessing is not coincidence but a structural mimicry: different actors travelling through historically  different pathways only to arrive at the same expansionary logic driven by common anxieties of growth saturation and resource constraints.

"Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism." — Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)

Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalist systems thrive on creative destruction, yet he also recognised their internal limit. Once innovation within large firms slows, growth no longer comes from internal research and development but from external acquisition – absorbing startups, technologies, and talent that can extend the corporate longevity. Modern conglomerates no longer innovate within themselves to grow; they acquire in order to survive. This is the acquisition imperative: the point at which expansion ceases to be a strategy for ambition and becomes a condition for existence. 

Survival, rather than innovation, becomes the operative logic. Once one digs deeper such stories appear almost everywhere such as Walmart’s 16 billion dollar acquisition of Flipkart, territorial expansion due to western retail saturation. A more popular one was Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp; while closer to home Tata Group’s steady absorption of brands across retail, digital services and airlines highlighted the conglomerate extending its reach.

A strikingly similar logic that animates corporate acquisitions appears to have seeped into the behaviour of sovereign actors too. Nation-states increasingly seem to respond to structural pressures in ways awfully similar to multinational firms.

As global order shifts towards multipolar configuration, strategic thinkers like Lee Kuan Yew argued that great powers compete over regions principally for their resources, population and strategic sea lanes – not ideology. Energy, critical minerals, logistics corridors, and ecological assets have become the defining variables of geopolitical leverage. Outward expansion, under such conditions, becomes a strategic response to internal saturation and frustrations. 

Expanding to Survive

States, like firms, are no longer expanding because they can – they are expanding because they must, to survive.

Russia’s war in Ukraine, whatever its stated rationale maybe, squarely maps the previous argument: occupied territories of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Crimea are atop significant reserves of lithium, coal, titanium, graphite and manganese and all of these are integral for this new industrial era. Similar grammar can also be found in USA’s approach to Venezuela where White House held meeting with oil executives after removal of President Maduro in January, 2026 following decades of sanctions and a naval blockade in December 2025. The sequence – political pressure, destabilisation, access negotiation – mirrors a corporate hostile acquisition more closely than traditional statecraft. Venezuela holding the world's largest reserve of oil is not incidental; it is, arguably, the entire context itself.

Sri Lankan and Bangladesh Examples

China’s Belt and Road Initiative - which funded Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port through loans resulting in a 99-year lease to Chinese State-owned enterprise in 2017 due to Colombo’s struggle to service said loans - follows the same expansionary script. A strategically located asset commanding the Indian Ocean trade routes, whether by structural drift or design, landed in long-term operational control of a foreign state. Immanuel Wallerstein, the world-systems theorist, would find this unequal architecture of core economies taking advantage of peripheral resources eerily similar.

Bangladesh offers more recent illustrations on this. The sudden removal of PM Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, installation of unelected interim government who signed a sequence of long-term concession agreements such as:

Chattogram Port’s New Mooring Container Terminal deal with DP World

Laldia Terminal leased for 30 years to shipping giants Maersk/APM Terminals;

LNG agreement with US-based Excelerate Energy for 15- years at prices higher than market rates;

Reciprocal trade deal with USA formalised 3-days prior to national elections

The country saw indefinite port worker strikes while prominent economists called the agreements to be against their national interest, yet the interim government had continued. Formal sovereignty, it seems, does not always guarantee substantive autonomy. The architecture of dependence, sometimes, lasts longer, even after the symbols of independence have been secured. Samir Amin, the Egyptian economist spent his life mapping exactly this very scenario where institutional arrangements progressively constrain economic autonomy long after formal sovereignty is retained.

Using the Same Grammar

Interestingly, both corporate and sovereign actors today use the same grammar of necessity to justify expansion. This expansionary legitimisation is used by both actors in an effort to repackage structural necessity as strategic choice. Ushering in an era of geo-corporate mimicry where States adopt the operational logic of multinational firms while corporations assume the geopolitical instincts of States. 

This convergence increasingly circulates the rhetoric of green finance and sustainability which function as reputational scaffolding i.e. structures erected around business-as-usual to make familiar expansionary logic appear morally palatable. Sustainability, in such scenarios, risks becoming a language absorbed by the very systems it was intended to challenge and correct.

Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that sustainable resource governance depends not upon  market acquisitions but in institutional design and collective leadership. Sustainability, therefore, is not an ethical accessory to sovereignty rather it is one of the structural prerequisites. 

If States lose resource control over their ecological and strategic assets through processes of geo-corporate mimicry, the erosion of their sovereignty begins. This happens not with the lowering of flags but with the quiet transfer of decision-making power over shared resources. Ultimately, managing these limited yet shared resources may well become the final site to secure collective well-being and political independence in an increasingly resource constrained world.

(The author is a sustainability researcher and public policy professional who examines governance through interdisciplinary perspectives linking political economy, sustainability and institutional change. The views expressed are personal. She can be contacted at bonhi.mu@gmail.com  )

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