Communities of experts can, through strategic action, have a large influence on the actions of powerful institutions.

Alfred Adler’s The emergence of cooperation: national epistemic communities and the international evolution of the idea of arms control talks about how a community of scientists and strategists (in many ways similar to the EA community) played a key role in creating the ideas that led to nuclear arms control agreements. The article is a bit long; I’d recommend reading the first couple of paragraphs, then skipping to the section “Intellectual innovation” (page 111).

Other relevant writing on epistemic communities

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I previously drew on Adler's work to derive lessons for (military) AI governance, in: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13523260.2019.1576464