While back in 1941 at the height of World War II (WWII), Erich Fromm assessed the root causes of the rise of nationalistic dictatorial regimes, and spoke of the inability of modern man and woman to act independently and self-confidently because s/he feels emptiness and powerlessness after attaining his/her freedom and emancipation from royals and autocrats—and therefore tends to fall for despotic leaders. Nevertheless, he also argued that the ‘post-modern people must convert these freedoms and individualizations into responsibilities and participation as the only way to overcome tyranny’ (Fromm et al., 1990). Today we know of no single governance model that would fit best for what he had hoped for, albeit many political systems and regime types have tried and some modern constitutional democracies might come closest to his ideal.

Glocal Governance is a manner of taking decisions and implementing them that comes closest to Fromm’s vision. And because local and global political world orders are currently in transition, it comes as little surprise that in 2021, the first global Summit for Democracy took place in Washington DC, with over 100 heads of government, civil society, and the private sector discussing democratic renewal and tackling, through collective action, the most significant threats faced by democracies today (US State Department, 2021). Representatives of governments, international organizations, and city mayors and civil society leaders met to discuss the challenge of modern governance. The dates chosen for this summit, namely the 10th of December, the International Day of Human Rights, underlined the global principles by which modern democracies are guided globally and at the same time are run by various stakeholders locally, and hence glocal.

Glocal governance is a multi-stakeholder governance practice following international human rights norms and democratic principles. It is, as Haller et al. (2019, p. 1) phrase it, the interaction between local participatory governance and the development of institutions combined with a political economy approach that focuses on the global changes as it relates to the increasingly globalized expansion of capitalist modes of production, consumption, and societal reproduction.

During the summit, governmental and civil society representatives prepared the ground for future challenges for such interaction between the local and the global, highlighting the challenges and pitfalls of strengthening democratic institutions and of preventive measures to stop authoritarianism from happening under the threats of global warming, widespread corruption, and the challenges of the digital age. In short, the summit tackled the paradigm shifts of governance in the Anthropocene, an era during which our human activity has been the dominant influence on the climate and environment of the entire planet. Or in other terms: If we were able to destroy the planet, might we also be able to fix it? Along with this, the participants strengthened the concept of Human Security, and hence the desire to be free, free from want, and live a self-determined and dignified life, the essential driver for enhancing democracy.

Glocal governance can, in brief, be described as a procedural, rotating, and non-permanent regime of different actors and stakeholders that gather, consult, and build consensus in adherence with universally agreed norms and standards. Glocalized governance is a triangulation between a (1) diverse set of stakeholders and actors both on local, global, and national levels; (2) good governance and democratic principles; and (3) universal values and global norms and standards (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1
figure 1

Glocal governance triangle

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Glocal governance has been for decades discussed as a part of an ongoing global transformation process, starting in the 1990s, and that, on the one hand, is localizing and individualizing responsibilities. On the other hand, it is part of the New Cold War between political systems: liberal democracies on the one side and authoritarian surveillance regimes on the other. Against this backdrop, glocal governance is a conceptual framework to understand better the political and social paradigm shifts in the global South and the global North. Moreover, it is a proposal to assess and explain the local–global connectivity and implementation of global norms and concepts, such as human rights and democracy, on local and community levels. Glocal governance is a multi-level decision-making process in which different actors and stakeholders in the private or public sectors take joint decisions, divide responsibilities, and enforce decisions locally, according to global universal principles, norms, and laws. These processes and actions allow for a transparent and participatory process to solve and fix problems locally. If political decisions and implementation processes are intransparent, have hidden agendas, are controlled by exclusive, elitist clubs, and if these stakeholders cannot be held accountable because they are above the law, then mistrust and corruption grow among citizens and communities.

Looking back into antiquity, we see that our admiration for Eunomia (Εὐνομία), the Greek goddess of good order and lawful conduct, stands at the beginning of what we can call today glocal governance. She represents our longing for a society in which everyone, no matter a person's background, ethnicity, gender, or social status, can prosper, enjoys equal opportunities, and live in peace and dignity. Sometimes we claim this ideal society to be communitarian, liberal, or simply the struggle between the fittest, the strongest, and the weak. Nevertheless, whatever we claim it to be, Eunomia keeps reminding us of our desire for internal stability, based on good laws and the maintenance of civil order.

Furthermore, the goddess reminds us that the more hierarchical and autocratic a social order is, the more likely conflicts and wars are to occur; and if it is anarchical and without leadership, chaos also rises. In 2019, the European Union launched its Competence Centre on Foresight, issuing its first paper on ‘Glocalisation of Governance.’ In this paper the Union highlighted that the multi-level and shared power principle, characterized by subsidiarity, collaborative, and participatory working habits, can improve governments’ effectiveness and legitimacy, and this will guide the Unions governance reforms. Local communities should engage more actively in international cooperation and world politics and act more agilely (EU Competence Center, 2019). With this statement, the EU is the first organization to launch a campaign under the title ‘The Future of Government 2030+’ in line with the 2015 launched UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). It is favoring a citizen-centric perspective on new government models. The EU is fully aware of the urgency to reform modern Nation-States, but not abolish them.

Hence the question to what extent glocal governance changes or contributes to make governmental regimes more functional and effective is to what extent do people manage to organize a governance system that is horizontal and inclusive, even beyond statehood? From the early works by Rhodes (1997) who is defining good governance as a set of principles of transparency, accountability, and participation, in the light of the changing modes of governance in Europe, to the seminal works by Bhaskara Rao and Sriram Shankar (2012) or by Hufty (2011), good governance is a decision-making concept that includes on horizontal levels as many diverse stakeholders as possible in facing societal challenges and solving problems. Hufty paraphrases it as making decisions regarding joint public policy problems, thereby creating standards, rules, and institutions, that can be voluntarily shared by the majority of people and is therefore built on consensus (2011). Hence, governance points to the interplay of institutions, procedures, stakeholders, and actors steering the shared decision-making and implementation of a social entity, be it a state, an organization, a group of people, or a club. These principles of governance are the normative foundations to respect human dignity, which requires individual freedom, justice, and solidarity and are grounded in international human rights treaties.

One way of approaching Fromm's uncertainties of modernity is to investigate the concepts of glocalization, glocality, and glocalism as a basis for different modes of governance, namely glocal governance—explained more in detail later in this book. Glocal governance has emerged because some national governments have proven to be incapable or unwilling to fix problems of transnational or global dimensions within their own countries, such as global health, climate change, or cyber security. Hence, thinking global and acting local can be seen in two ways, first, as a threat to erode national sovereignty and authority, as Grinin (2012) argues, and second, as an effective and practical alternative governance model to corrupt and bureaucratic national governments, according to Stiglitz (2008).

National governments are losing sovereignty and legitimacy in a globalized world at both ends. On the one side, they share and transfer power—willingly or not—with three different entities: first to international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) or the European Union (EU). On the other side, local community leaders, city majors and private entrepreneurs, and civil society organizations and actors (CSOs) fill power gaps that governments leave behind if they are unable to respond to citizens needs or problems. If citizens instead trust the abilities of WHO, UN or EU, or of business, and NGOs more than governments to fix their day-to-day problems of schooling, income, health, or access to information then national governments are mere Potemkin villages. Glocal governance has its roots in the incapability of corrupt and authoritarian leaderships that adhere to a static nationalistic form of statehood that no longer responsed to global demands of citizens, for mobility, individual opportunity, and human security.

In our thriving bipolar world which is on the one side is populated by a globally interconnected Internet-literate citizenry, which is approx. 60% of the world's population, and on the other side, people living in authoritarian, often autocratic, patriarchal, and nationalistic societies which make up to approx. 40% of the world's population, a New Cold War between modes of governance is thriving along these ‘societal divides.’ Hence, we have a 60:40 divide that marks the frontier of the New Cold War between democratically and autocratically governed societies and countries. Moreover, it is here where glocal governance comes in as an approach to test and to reform governance regimes of all types. The financial crisis in 2009 and the pandemic in 2020, let alone the wars in Central Europe in 2020 in Caucasus and 2022 in Ukraine, lifted the covers of the plethora of dysfunctional regime types, in democracies and autocracies alike. The latter were not inter-ethnic or civil wars, but wars among political regimes, namely between regimes such as in Ukraine and Armenia who slowly dared to turn into democracies, and others, such as Russia and Azerbaijan who became more autocratic.

In a glocal setup, citizens ought to hold all stakeholders accountable for failed politics on all levels, even in the virtual and cyberspace. Prior to the 2022 war in Ukraine and at the dawn of the New Cold War era in 2021, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden met in a video conference to discuss militarization issues in Central Europe. After the talk it became clear that there is not only a geographical divide, but also a virtual one between the two regimes, marked by a new ‘Digital Curtain’ instead of Iron Curtain. The new curtain marks the battlefield between democracies and autocracies, those who uphold fundamental freedom rights on the Internet and those regimes which censor them as a means of control over their citizens. Apart from the physical front lines and Cold War curtains between the East and the West in Europe, cyberspace also has its virtual front line marked by censorship and blocked websites. Cyberspace has become the virtual battlefield combining the local and the global. But it is also a glocal space to inform, learn, meet, discuss, consult, and make business. It is the battlefield of propaganda and ideas, facts and fakes, opportunities, and surveillance at the same time. In this respect, the glocal cyberspace is a combination of the formal and informal, hence of multi-stakeholders, operating within fluid borders between the local, the national, and the global.

1.1 Think Global, Act Locally

‘Think global, act locally’ is the essence of glocalism. Glocal governance means that local stakeholders, such as businesses, civil society, city councils, authorities, and activists actively participate in decision-making. Different stakeholders, including local, international, and domestic ones, make decisions on standard rules and regulations while operating, controlling, implementing, and enforcing them locally—and wherever needed. Many of these decisions meet global or international standards. Such standards can be universal UN human rights norms as enshrined in international human rights treaties and agreements, and trade norms established by the WTO to regulate trade, tax, or copyright.

The founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Klaus Schwab, asserts the changes he has observed in governance in his 2020 Manifesto. He highlights that private enterprises and businesses, overall ICT Tech giants, such as Meta and Amazon, have become de facto key governors who carry responsibility for citizens’ common good and prosperity because ‘The purpose of a company is to engage all its member's stakeholders in shared and sustained value creation. In creating such value, a company serves not only its shareholders, but all its stakeholders – employees, customers, suppliers, local communities and society at large’ (WEF, 2020).Footnote 1 The most prominent economic union in the world, the EU, responded to these shifts in governance between the virtual, local, and national by setting global regulations on ‘Ethics and Data Protection' and ‘Supply Chain’ policies in 2021—regulating consumer protections beyond Nation-States. And in the same vein the G20 launched ‘Global Minimum Tax Deal’ in 2021, and by this both the EU and G20 were exercising de facto glocal governance.Footnote 2 To underline these shifts within the EU, Morlino et al. (2020) found out that state governments are no longer critical holders of sovereign power in the EU, but different stakeholders are. Instead, the authors argue that if state authorities are no longer capable of balancing people's desire for freedom and equality, the idea of the multi-class state will begin to take hold, reflecting a wish for autonomy and the organized forces arising from civil society. Democratic power in the traditional sense of representative democracy declines, but the desire for technical-scientific expertise rises. It means that the democratic backsliding must be compensated for in other ways, namely through procedural multi-level and multi-stakeholder participation (Morlino et al., 2020).

Earlier, in 2004, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a set of Principles of Corporate Governance, providing a guideline to evaluate practical policy impact through the multi-stakeholder approach that would soon replace or complement delegative systems in modern democracies. Other existing analytical frameworks highlight how private or corporate actors enjoy political legitimacy if they provide public services to communities in the absence of effective government (Bernstein & Cashore, 2007). The Global Governance Framework offered by Dingwerth and Eichinger (2010) and the concept of Governance beyond Nation-States (Parker, 2017) focus on the links between standards, values, and how national governments and businesses respond to them.

Glocal governance is not only emerging when governments fail to exercise their obligations toward their citizens; it also emerges to make democratic political systems more effective and strengthen them, whenever glocal decision-making meet citizens’ expectations (FAO, 2017). Civil society organizations (CSO) or private actors act complementary to democratic government, but can be an alternative mode of governance for autocratic or corrupt regimes. Instead, in a 2012 UNDP report on Good Governance and Development in the world, the agency already emphasizes that only looking at governmental performance is too short-sighted to understand economic growth or societal development, let alone democratic development and the role that social media and the Internet has for it. The existing frameworks to measure governmental performances and governance output explain the level of accountability, effective time management, or how decision-makers comprehensively monitor results, but not whether societies are well governed or not. 

Thus far, International Relations (IR) has best responded to the global paradigm shift toward glocal governance. For IR scholars, the Nation-State is no longer the key actor in IR, and hence it should be called Glocal Relations (GR) instead. GR encompasses all institutional levels and stakeholders that govern when solving transnational conflicts. GR scholars reckon that state authorities and national governments play a less significant role in managing transnational trade, migration and peoples mobility, border conflicts, let alone the consequences of climate change, or cyber security. During the 2020–2022 global pandemic, it was largely civil society engagement and international aid and relief organizations and private enterprises that responded to the medical needs of people and provided food and shelter. Global governance theorists, such as Zürn (2018), illustrate that global principles based on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law adopted by national and local authorities can lead to norm contestations and conflicts. Nevertheless, global norms, adhered to and adapted by local actors, can lead to faster solutions locally. Such norm diffusion and local practices enhance glocal governance, but on the other side, it de-legitimizes and erodes national institutions and state authority with negative consequences for law enforcement.

To govern glocally is first and foremost to conceptualize governance beyond the classical concept of territorial and sovereign statehood. Secondly, we must see different actors’ capabilities and entitlements and their contribution to solving problems and facing day-to-day challenges, and thirdly, it is worth looking at various political, civil, and private actors who participate in any decision-making process.

Global and local paradigm shifts are always driven by crisis and technologies that permanently change how societies govern their commons. Hence, what makes these twenty-first-century shifts so different? One reason is that it turns the traditional modes of governance up-side-down, giving more voices and decision-making capacity to private and civil actors. The twentieth-century international order of composed of sovereign governments, resolving issues between states and, that control a certain territorial space and citizen living in this space, no longer works in the Anthropocene. The twenty-first-century glocal governance approach, instead aims to fix the broken relationships between citizens and their state authorities. The advantage of glocal stakeholders is that they adhere directly to universal standards while responding directly in the community, locally. Glocally active stakeholders can network and exchange best practices with other stakeholders immediately through new information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Be that as it may, the question remains, how are global norms and agreements implemented and enforced on the local or individual level without much interactions by state authorities? Over the past decades the developments of extraterritorial and universal jurisdictions allowed law enforcement agents and judges to hold perpetrators accountable no matter in which corner of the world they hide.

The Climate Protection Act in Germany in 2019,Footnote 3 for example, illustrates how local actors and CSOs, such as Fridays-for-Future (F4F) and the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) jointly lodged a constitutional complaint against the German government for not fulfilling its duty to fight global warming. In April 2021, the German Constitutional Court confirmed the complaint of these individuals who claimed that the government is violating global norms, not only in its territory but also globally. By allowing to hear complaints that deal with global threats, the court deteriorates state sovereignty to some extent, or it challenges state authorities to undertake more actions outside its own state borders to protect people from the consequences of climate change. If state authorities are unwilling or incapable to act, other actors fill in the gap and aim to look at responsibilities and hold stakeholders accountable for damage and crimes done elsewhere in the world.

In the same vein, in December 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court, the highest court in the Netherlands, decided on a claim filed in 2015 known as the ‘Urgenda Climate Case.’ The judges found that the Dutch government has obligations to reduce emissions urgently and significantly in line with its human rights obligations. Earlier in 2015, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the Dutch government must cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020 (compared to 1990 levels) to save peoples' lives, not only in the Netherlands. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva responded to the ruling by stressing, ‘that the Government of the Netherlands and, by implication, other governments have binding legal obligations, based on international human rights law, to undertake strong reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases.’Footnote 4 Similar rulings are seen elsewhere by national courts, and they follow a trend that started back in 1793 with the US Alien Claims Tort Act, which allows holding someone accountable for his/her wrongdoings elsewhere in the world, in front of US courts. This Act is the predecessor of the modern concept of Extraterritorial Jurisdiction, endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2019, for example, to fight global terrorism glocally, meaning that persons who are accused of terrorist acts can be put on trial no matter what their citizenship is and no matter where they committed these acts.Footnote 5 It gives national governments the legal ability to exercise authority beyond their national boundaries.

At the same time, the 1960s, rise of CSOs seems to be unstoppable. It started with The Russel Tribunal for Peace, Amnesty International for Human Rights, and the International Commission of Jurists in the 1960s, and when these citizen-driven organizations were demanding governments to comply with global and universal human rights norms to protect people locally elsewhere in the world. The aftermath of the post-Cold War period from 1990 to 2015 was perhaps the most democratic quarter-century in world history and the most citizen driven at the same time, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue in their book on ‘How Democracies Die’ in 2018. Now we are in a period of disenchantment and leaders either adhere to global norms, and act democratically, or break these norms, leading to political leadership's reauthorization. US President Donald Trump's term from 2016 to 2020 was a global norm breaker. Being a populist and nationalist, he jeopardized global democratic norms such as inclusiveness and fairness and eroded the democratic system in the US (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 205). However, he seriously damaged the regime for most parts where it was already weak and unconsolidated, such as for example worsening the already weak social welfare system and the deeply ingrained racist-driven law enforcement mechanism. Global participatory norms and fundamental freedoms are the essences, of democracies that makes it an intriguing model for the millions who feel deprived of their rights and freedoms. If these freedoms are abused, for example by making use of extensive hate speech and broadcasting of false information, democracy is weakened. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that human rights norms foster ‘mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance’ among people beyond formal rules, and hence it is the attitude, adherence, and behavior toward freedoms and rights that matter, not institutions. In the past democratic actors established ‘a set of shared beliefs and practices that helped make those institutions work’ for all despite their diverse backgrounds (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 212–213). This makes democracy so intriguing for many people worldwide and is currently fueling ongoing mass protests and claims for freedom and democracy since the 2010s from Santiago de Chile, via Tel Aviv, Beirut, Minsk, Moscow to Bangkok, and Hong Kong, without slowing down. Even though, many protests are not successful in changing political regimes and activists need to move into exile, the claims for more freedom and self-determination became louder not more silent. In his earlier works about the American Creed in the 1960s, Gunnar Myrdal found that the strict upholding of the principles of individual freedoms and egalitarianism speaks to most of us and what we expect from governments across the globe and have therefore become fundamental principles and universal benchmarks for good governance.

1.2 Glocal Modes of Governance

If governance is the institutionalization of norms and needs, aiming to overcome individual anxieties, corruption, nepotism, and despotism, then human rights are the normative benchmarks to set the standards for this institutionalized mode of governance. Norms determine the manner how we organize and institutionalize the society in which we want to live. Goddess Eunomia can only be as effective as the norms and principles she adheres to. They allow us to negotiate social contracts in the form of constitutions and treaties among all relevant stakeholders. By this, we also define which mode of governance we want to be ruled and even controlled by. The modes range from individual anarchical to strictly hierarchal authoritarian, such as monarchial, patriarchal, oligarchic, cleric, and warlord regimes, or horizontal parliamentarian democracies or council-driven regimes. Emirates and Sultanates such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or The Sultanate of Brunei and one-party regimes, such as the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China (CPC), mark one of the most hierarchical and autocratic modes of governance. Others are religious and ideological forms of governance, such as the Catholic Vatican State, The Islamic Republic of Iran, the Jewish State of Israel or the Marxist-Leninist socialist Republic of Cuba. Ideological or religious-driven regimes must constantly outmaneuver their self-imposed exclusive privileges given to citizens based on birth, religion, or party membership by using strong nationalistic narratives and a propaganda machinery. That leads to a constant competition—if not suppression—with democratic principles and practice. China’s CPC, for example, needed to create a centralized ‘surveillance State’ that is opposed to democratic-constitutional states and free elections that would allow for fair and equal competition between suitable candidates. Modern states run by hereditary constitutional monarchies, such as Norway, Australia, the Netherlands, or Japan, often score high on democratic performance but suffer a lack of legitimacy in governmental leadership that sometimes ends in political violence by anti-royalists. But even non-hereditary democracies such as Switzerland or Germany, face today serious challenges of representative and parliamentarian democracy, by ineffective oversized parliaments and heavily bureacratized administrations.

Formally, all modern constitutions, even the one by China, are adhering in principle to fundamental freedoms and human rights and have installed some level of the Rule of Law. However, the way they govern these norms and laws in practice could not be more different. The most common mode of governance today in Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America is a hybrid mix of authoritarian and democratic rulership, called anocracy. Anocracy is also known under the notion of defective, embedded, electoral, and semi-democratic regime type. At least half of the world’s constitutional regimes show elements of anocracy by the way they exercise a formal division of parliamentary and presidential powers, frequency of elections, and censorship of media freedoms and civil society. Pseudo-family-driven, clientelist political elite or organized criminals run for president and the parliament and distribute public offices depending on ethnicity, language, patronage, or other forms of clientelisms.

The different modi of glocal governance can also be measured along the lines of inclusiveness versus exclusiveness of democratic practices. What is meant by it is how inclusive state institutions act; do they include all members of minorities, no matter their ethnicity, gender, or religion, in an equal share in the decision-making? Or are people excluded based on endogenous criteria such as faith, race, family, income, or caste? The more exclusive a regime is, the more it tends toward autocratic and top-down patriarchal governance. The more it tends toward a pluralistic and horizontal governmental structure based on merits and qualifications instead of heritage, the more inclusive it is.Footnote 6 Yet, the level of governance performance can be best measured during times of crisis, when a political regime must respond quickly to threats that affect the entire society within its state boundaries. Autocratic governance regimes are most vulnerable to exercising inclusive policies at times of crisis, and often respond with harsh measures, such as lockdowns, martial laws, or censorship. The marginalized or vulnerable are often most heavily affected by these measures and suffer even more than during ‘normal’ periods. Autocratic regimes are often fearful regimes and therefore opt for radical measures to solve problems. The weaker they are, the more likely they threaten groups of people with expulsion or other countries with war. Political violence, corruption, and even poverty rise, because the battle for scarce resources is tighter than before and equal distribution system was never developed in times of tranquility. Democratic systems instead, in times of crisis, are even more pressured to be transparent and accountable to citizens. Dialogue with citizens, inclusion of private actors, enterprises, and public-private partnerships itensify during these periods and direct consultation with those most affected by the crisis. Millions lost their homes and work during the financial crisis in 2009, and so did the war refugees from Syria in 2015, and those directly affected by the Covid pandemic in 2020 and the wars in Central Europe in 2020 and 2022, and it were mostly different private and public stakeholders who came to rescue during these periods, overall from and within democratic countries.

The Nation-State that is currently dissolved was built as an answer to the consequences of the industrial and colonial era of the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries Building Nation-States was the answer to nineteenth-century erosion of monarchies. Todays respond to the erosion of Nation-State is glocalization. In the twenty-first century, the glocal battle is between people and statehood, and to what extent regimes are adhering or bypassing human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Strictly holding to the concept of the Westphalian Nation-State from 1648 can be seen as one of the root causes for the current regimes in crisis. The Westphalian principles of the coexistence of sovereign states is seriously jeopardized by two factors, namely (1) globalization and ICT and (2) the rapid mobility and migration of people. Both dynamics are intertwined and affect citizens’ lives directly, locally, not nationally.

The other key factor that forces us to rethink governance is growth and how we measure it. In times of national sovereignty, economic growth was defined by territorial space, public and individual property, and effective exploitation of natural and human resources, productivity, innovation, and capital. A sovereign state is one that has de jure and de facto control over its (1) territorial resources, (2) the security forces, as well as (3) currency and trade in order to facilitate economic development and give safety guarantees for its citizens, in exchange of taxes and loyalty to the laws. This social contract between classical statehood and citizens is not longer working. If we look at these three core principles of statehood, we see that, many states no longer have de facto that control. In many countries warlords run the security sector, and the state monopoly over the ‘use of force’ is transferred to private mercenaries’ companies such as Black Water (US), Wagner (Russia), the Frontier Service Group (China), who are paid and sent by governments on missions in war torn countries. Similarly, transnational enterprises develop their own rules to determine the economy of other countries and undertake all necessary transactions in Dollars, Pounds, or EUR as lead currencies. In addition, the slogan ‘who controls the Internet, will control the world’ adds to the de facto erosion of statehood because much of private and local business is today run on platforms owned by companies and CEOs that are mostly in the US, Europe, or China and hence beyond state control of most countries. Territorial property and clientelism become relative but no less contagious. Those authoritarian states that lose de facto control over their territories, such as recently Lebanon, Tajikistan, Nigeria, or Venezuela, are marked by a rise of ethnic-nationalistic-populist (male) leadership that wants to hold back, by all means, the status quo of the Westphalian principles of sovereignty. They justify political violence and human rights abuse and even military interventions with the goal of winning back state sovereignty.