Big Tech as World Makers: A Research Agenda for International Political Sociology

The rise of big tech companies marks a profound reconfiguration of the social, political, and economic foundation of global life. As these companies have grown, they have destabilized the very categories through which we understand International Relations, challenging its ontological, epistemological, and normative foundations. Big tech companies are active in the (re)making of global orders, across the public and private, national and global, state and nonstate domains. Their hardware, algorithms, and platforms shape what counts as knowledge and whose voices are heard, and their imaginaries produce new articulations of security, sovereignty, identity and global politics. Yet, their influence is neither uniform nor unidirectional. International Political Sociology (IPS) is uniquely positioned to explore this dynamic. We call for a research agenda that treats big tech as both a subject and an object of world-making, embracing IPS’ strengths—disciplinary openness, reflexivity, methodological pluralism, and global orientation—to interrogate these dynamics sociologically and critically. In doing so, we seek not only to promote studies of how big tech reshapes the world, but also to reflect on how it transforms the very possibilities for studying, producing and imagining global politics.