Research Talk: Firm-Led State Building as a Strategy to Avert Community Protest

On Thursday, 13 November 2025, Dr. Alexander Rustler, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford, will deliver a research talk titled, “Arming the Leviathan Without Arms: How Firms Build States to Avoid Community Protest.” The event will be held from 16:15 to 17:30 h in room A-24-0-216.

Dr. Rustler's research addresses a significant tension in nonmarket strategy: direct social goods provision by firms in institutional voids can be necessary to avoid community protest, yet it can also paradoxically lead to protest by elevating community expectations.

Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Peru’s mining sector, the study analyzes how one of the world's largest mining firms successfully managed this challenge. The findings indicate the firm avoided protest not by acting as a direct provider, but by strategically increasing state presence.

Dr. Rustler inductively generates a process model of "firm-led state building," which captures how the firm systematically built administrative state capacity, constructed state legitimacy, and negotiated a social contract between local communities and the state. This work offers key contributions to research intersecting nonmarket strategy, social movements, and public-private governance.

This research is part of a larger project examining how organizations operate and survive in weak-state contexts, based on extensive fieldwork including interviews with movement leaders and other local actors. Dr. Rustler holds a PhD in Management from the University of Oxford.