Glocality Is the Current State of the Art

Abstract

Exogenous and endogenous dynamics and factors determine the level of glocality, and the practice of glocal governance. Climate change, digitalization, and urbanization, the rise of non-state actors and erosion of statehood, and in many cases dysfunctional governments, are calling for a more participatory and multi-stakeholder driven form of governance. Other modes of governance such as public–private partnership engage public and private actors to realize glocal governance. Global mobility will increase, both virtual and in person, and hence people will move in spaces and in territories without clear boundaries, laws, and limits. Glocal governance give guidelines and rules how to organize communities in this borderless world.

International Law, the SDGs and the multitude of Global Compacts, and the mushrooming of regional organizations and World Fora, let alone the millions of CSOs and ICT platforms, have today fabricated connectivity from the local to the global and back to the local. Quite unique in human history, it is the state of the art of glocality, but it is, also orchestrated by exogenous and endogenous factors.

The stage for glocality was set in the early 1990s with the aim to link the local to the domestic and from there to the global and back to the local. Thus, the rise of ICT, and global mobility provided the ground for new models of governance, including public–private partnerships (PPP) and the first UN Global Compact for business and human rights in 1999, followed by the 2005 self-imposed Accountability Charter by NGOs to set ethical standards for all CSOs globally. Global and local stakeholders felt directly accountable to citizens and this accelerated the erosion of statehood. These were early signs that states would either need to share power with the global and local levels and hence decentralize in all directions or defend their power through coercion and turn back to autocracies. Today the world is divided into decentralized/glocalizing states and centralizing/automatizing states.

Boundaries of all sorts became fluid, and hybridity of anything that we once knew as territorial statehood became the new normal. PPP, for example, introduced in 1992 by the Conservative government in the UK, aimed at encouraging businesses to co-finance the public sector, and privatization and co-sponsoring of hospitals and schools has become the norm, not the exception in democracies and autocracies alike. In their book on The Commons in a Glocal World (2019), Haller et al. looked at several global–local governance cases around the world. They found that state and private property arrangements in a glocal world can potentially destabilize common property institutions, such as the public sectors, and therefore can undermine sustainable development if governments do not monitor them (Haller et al., 2019, p. 17). In a similar vein, the concept of shared responsibility between different stakeholders on one subject matter and the global deal on business supply chains are best to be realized when monitor by transparent governance regimes. Normative orders such as human rights have shaped the public sector today, independently from political orders or international regimes (Risse & Lehmkuhl, 2006). Hence, political culture everywhere has changed, albeit not always in the same direction, and so has the role of different stakeholders and actors (North et al., 2009). These exogenous and endogenous factors responsible for this change have shaped our expectations toward good governance (Geddes, 1999).

4.1 Exogenous Dynamics

The exogenous dynamic of glocal governance is fabricated by externally imposed crises and globally shared challenges, such as climate change, global mobility, or pandemics that lead to new forms of urban governance and labor markets, and subsequently how we deal with public matters of health, schooling, work, housing, and security.

The growing number of World Summits under the chairmanship of the G20, the UN, or ASEAN, together with scientists, CSOs, businesses, and NSAs, are on the one side of the spectrum. On the other side are new forms of multi-level and multi-stakeholder responses by national and local actors that transcend national and international consensus among state governments. At first sight, these exogenous factors help maintain territorial and state stability, climate change, cybercrime, pandemics, and migration, but looking closer at it, they erode the state and its authorities as we know them to construct new modes of global and local governance regimes.

4.1.1 Climate Change

Climate change is the mother of all paradigm shifts in the twenty-first century. For some, it has reached the level of a ‘weapon of mass destruction,’ making people lose their homes, become refugees and stateless, billions of people competing for scared resources and becoming genocidaires against people and fauna. For others, it has changed our way of life and priorities turning ‘sustainability into a new and transformative ideal.’ In 2021, the World Bank published a report estimating that by 2050 there will be 200 million climate refugees that need to be accommodated, trained, and housed. The majority of them will most likely live in megacities. For Vanderheiden, sustainability and renewability are the new benchmarks against which any type of governance regime must be measured (Vanderheiden, 2020). No matter the political system, whatever mode of governance can best deal with climate change and all its consequences, will be the one that receives the most support from citizens, and hence be a legitimate one. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that global temperatures will increase by two degrees. It will have beneficial impacts in some regions and harmful ones in others, but together it means there will be a need for governance change, most likely connected to dissolving of boundaries as we know them. The net annual costs for governments to respond to droughts, floods, and resettlement of their population will increase and, for some, accelerate their GDP.

Climate change triggers creativity, and problem-solving initiatives, and partnerships far beyond Nation-States. Ideology and nationalism become more and more redundant when people no longer have access to clean water or have adequate housing. It mobilizes in a short time millions of people, bundles the dynamics for universal jurisdiction, and increases technological innovations. In 2007 the IPCC received the Nobel Peace Prize for its unconventional governance in seeking bottom-up and globally linked solutions among all stakeholders that mattered in the case of floods, disaster relief, or migration. The MSA approach allows for inclusive participation and consensus-driven solutions that must be timely and practical. The Pacific Island State of Vanuatu, in 2019, for example, sought an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to stop sea levels rising so the state can exist. In alliance with the other Island States that will soon disappear from the surface of the world, they formally aim to secure the future of their citizens and call upon the obligations of states under international law to protect the rights of present and future generations against the adverse effects of climate change. Other examples, such as the citizen-driven Extinction Rebellion movement, or Fridays for Future (F4F), have been rising in less than a decade, enjoying billions of supporters. They are the most significant and most global citizen movements in human history. Global initiatives and projects such as the Youth Climate Pact Challenge and the My-World-Our-Planet initiative are among the largest globally accessible via the Internet and supported by thousands of different citizen movements worldwide.

After 2006 was the hottest recorded year ever, Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas Friedman wrote about the consequences of climate change in 2007, calling for a global green deal that is agreed globally and implemented locally. In 2009 the UN launched an appeal for ‘Global Green New Deal for Climate, Energy, and Development’ that was later taken up by the US and the EU. Today thousands of local initiatives working toward the goals set later in the SDGs and the Paris Agreement in 2015. SDG No. 13 calls upon formal and informal actors and institutions to ‘take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts and concepts such as climate and environmental justice.’ Climate justice is by no means retributive but restorative and thus looking toward the future. All measures may be taken so that any intervention in the nature and energy sector needs to be sustainable and renewable, not exploitive, but beneficial for business alone. Globally, the Green New Deal (GND) refers to the goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement on reducing global warming. Rifkin (2019), one of the pioneers of the Internet of Things, also argues that renewable energy is cheaper than fossil energy and that future economy including pension funds can be generated through renewable energy and a shared economy, albeit this climate-friendly energy sector being in the hands of people, not states or elites, and governed democratically. Friedman, however, suggested that the state needs to set incentives for innovation in renewable energies that would be taken up by business, industry, and science, and hence guide and channel a fundamental change to reduce the use of fossil energy and at the same time guarantee the thirst for the energy of an ever-growing population. By 2020, over 1,300 city governments in over 20 countries have jointly led the global call on the ‘climate emergency’ and established their local NGDs together with their citizens.

To win the battle over climate change is a joint endeavor among different stakeholders. Thus far, the EU Commission is the largest supranational investor and major stakeholder, with 2 billion dollars (1.8 billion EUR) allocated until 2030 to invest in science and technologies and new ways of creating climate-neutral cities and industries. Rifkin highlights that local and private households are essential for insisting on renewable energy. Hence the success of the climate change movement is in the hands of individual households. Only they can make the transition from fossil to renewable energy supplies possible. The GND is therefore more than anything a glocal initiative that needs private households and businesses to succeed and strengthens their position vis-à-vis governments to achieve global goals. Since over half of the global GDP has a high dependency on natural resources, investing in nature-based solutions locally will not only limit global warming but also result in about 4 trillion dollars in revenue for businesses and over 100 million new jobs each year by 2030, as the UN Environment Program predicts.¹ Governmental actions are thus far too slow and too fragmented, taking up only one or some aspect of environmental justice.

The local community leaders, the city mayors, farmers, and CSOs deal with the consequences such as re-settlements and migration. Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin argue that for the GND, the critical factor will be how stakeholders unambiguously demonstrate ‘(…) how climate stabilization is fully consistent with expanding decent work opportunities, raising mass living standards, and fighting poverty in all regions of the world’ (Chomsky & Pollin, 2020, p. 154).

4.1.2 Global Mobility

Another exogenous factor that changes our current mode of governance is human mobility. It is partly related to climate change. Refugees, migrant workers, global nomads, urban dwellers, and the stateless pose a particular exogenous challenge to governance. If mobility is uncontrolled and not channeled, it can lead to unrest and the rapid spread of a pandemic, human trafficking, and hence nurture organized crime. Migrants, no matter whether they come or go, and no matter with what intentions they come, interfere in the homogeneity of a nation, and hence are mostly perceived as a threat to national identity and values.² Social mobility is more than migration, it also transfers ideas, concepts, beliefs, customs, and habits. It allows people to move from one social class to another, taking chances or losing them.

Mass migration from the poorest countries to the Global North is only stopped through donor-driven development aid. However, Gaim Kibreab documented how development aid in one of the poorest countries in the world, Eritrea, led to the stabilization of bad governance, and hence more corruption and eventually a highly militarized autocracy. These dictatorial regimes, nurtured by external aid, caused hundreds of thousands of young people to leave the country because the government saw no need to adapt to local demands and include people. Hence, more than anything, people flee corrupt and dysfunctional autocracies, not poverty as such. Climate change-induced droughts and floods often do the rest, causing millions of people to leave the region. In his study on Servitude for the Common Good and the Youth Exodus, Kibreab responded to Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning theory on ‘governing the commons’ and why her concept can go wrong. Ostrom researched rural areas in Asia, Africa, and North America and argued that development needs a set of global principles and norms, supported by an effective mobilization for local management of the shared pool resources, whether human or natural resources. If the local management works well and finds support from national authorities, everyone benefits from it, independently of traditions, geography, and locality (Ostrom, 2015). Her studies fueled the glocalization debate of that time, but Kibreab adds to the story that these progressive developments based on collective actions can only work if there are a minimum of democratic standards in practice and the government is willing or in need of collaborating with local authorities and people. If the government is maintained by the flow of development or oil and gas revenues, it does not need to collaborate with local leaders or citizens. Ostrom accepted the intervention but added that common resources are well managed under any circumstances when those who benefit from them the most are near them. For her, the tragedy occurred when external groups, such as organized crime or clientelist elites and even external international donors exerted their power politically, economically, or socially to gain a personal advantage—and hence de facto take over the function of autocratic regimes.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UNHCHR, and the UN Population Dynamics database together estimate that today 1:5 persons are migrating from their home at some stage in his/her life. There are roughly one billion people on the move within their country’s territorial boundaries and approx. 300 million migrate abroad and to other regions every year. Altogether, we estimate around 25 million (1:95) conflict-driven refugees in recent years. All migrants together would form the most densely populated state in the world with approx. 1.5 billion people. That makes 20% of the world’s population with either limited or no legal rights to politically participate in state-driven formal electoral processes, and hence an ever-growing critical and angry number of people that either express their interests through other means of violence and disobedience or look for more local informal ways of participation. The Bidibidi refugee camp in Uganda with over 300,000 refugees, mainly from South Sudan, is the largest globally and a de facto city, for which the government in Kampala provided land and where people can work. The UNHCHR, UNICEF, and other private donors and faith-based organizations provide education and training and often practical tools to farm the land. These people have no voting rights, let alone citizenship, that would allow for full political participation in the decision-making process over their faith. If someone commits a criminal act, Uganda’s government expels that person from the country. Uganda has become a ‘camping state’ where people have no permanent residence, are second-class citizens, and move from one camp to the other. Over the long haul, if more and more uprooted and mobile people get excluded from political participation, the territorial Nation-State turns into an ‘empty shell.’

Climate change-induced migration is led by young angry wo/men who leave their homes because they do not find work, joining those who seek refuge because of war and conflict, as well as those who are trafficked and sold into slavery. According to the IOM, the rate of working migrants who sent home remittances in 1970 was 2.5% of the working population worldwide, and today it is 3.5%.³ The exact figure of how many are on the move, uprooted, trafficked, and work as ‘global nomads’ can only be estimated, possibly up to 1:5. Both in countries they migrate to, and the countries they leave, this exodus of the youth has triggered populist autocratic regimes to rise, promising easy answers to this complex state of glocality.

In 2015 over 2 million war refugees from Syria flocked into Europe, many via Hungary and the Balkan route. Budapest was overwhelmed, and the dysfunctional government built a razor-wire fence to keep migrants out, beat and tortured them, and threatened to send them back to Serbia, from where they crossed the border. Despite international protest, the Hungarian government did not take down the fence and used war-like rhetoric calling migrants ‘invaders.’ Climate change challenges authoritarian regimes on various levels, because they cannot deal with it. From 2006 to 2011, a severe drought in Syria caused a mass migration of angry young families from the rural areas to Damascus, blaming the government for its incapability to provide for its citizens, and by this becoming part of the Arab Spring upheavals in the Middle East. The state suppression of these protests eventually led to civil wars, leading to mass migrations to Europe. Ironically enough, anocratic states like Syria and Hungary have no means to deal with the consequences of climate change and often use coercion, force, and even state terror. We can see a similar climate change-induced poverty and subsequent migration, so in January 2021, when 9,000 uprooted farmers from Honduras in Central America, wanted to cross the border of Guatemala to move further on to Mexico and the US and were held collectively in custody for weeks and months, causing much death without any government taking responsibility for them.⁴

Urbanization is yet another consequence of global mobility that cannot be dealt on state level only. In 1980, approximately 40% of the world’s population lived in urban areas and cities, and today it is 60%. Over 80% of the South and North American population live in cities and over 70% in Europe and Australia. However, Megacities of 10 million people and more are found predominately in Asia and the Global South, where roughly 50% of the population lives.⁵ The fact that these numbers have risen dramatically in only one generation has led to radical responses by overwhelmed governments that often seem to be at war with their population. Urban dwellers have instead created their own mode of governance to solve most daily life problems. And it seems that urban governors and local authorities best solve urban problems. In Mumbai, for example, the city dwellers cooperate with the city council, not the state for decades, because the government has no solutions to the dwellers’ challenges, or is absent (Moonen et al., 2014).

As we have seen, mobility can result from a free choice to seek better economic or lifestyle opportunities elsewhere; or conflicts and droughts can impose it. However, the consequences are the same: uncontrolled, unplanned urbanization and pre-urban areas that cannot provide for basic needs. Cities may also positively impact migrants’ inclusion when undertaken to strengthen the inclusion and resilience of diverse communities. However, urban planning for migrants’ inclusion may raise more difficulties in slums. They often escape the reach of national and local authorities, resulting in a lack of access to essential services for residents, including migrants. Africa had the highest rate of urban change of all continents, with an urban growth that is eleven times quicker than in Europe. Across the continent, rural–urban migration rates are high, with increasing rates of international migration as well.

In 2016, 68% of the entire urban population in Africa lived in informal urban settlements, thus representing a consolidated majority of the population that had no permanent residence, many of them not registered and without voting rights. It made national elections completely redundant because they no longer represent the country’s citizens. Apart from participation, local citizen-driven urban planning seems to have the highest impact on living conditions compared with state-led urban planning. Local communities engage directly with UN-led organizations such as HABITAT, UNICEF and Red Cross/Crescent, NGOs, and other private donors, like the Bill and Melinda Gates or the Agha Khan Foundation, in addition to development organizations such as USAID, GIZ, and faith-based organizations. Many of them have already replaced state functions and provide public goods such as nurseries, doctors, and schooling that are fundamental to keep the hollow state alive.⁶

Another driving force for migration is the lack of social mobility for the young. For 20-year-old young wo/men, it takes only a few cents to invest and watch sitcoms on Youtube that show a better life and more opportunities in other parts of the world. It is not a matter of lack of patriotism often not even poverty, which drives them leave their homeland. Much more, it is the hopeless striving for opportunities and fair conditions that they do not have in autocratic regimes. Today, Europe is seen for many as a social mobility project that appeals to young people from accross the world. The EU member states promise more freedom to choose works, skill training, and work opportunities for any of its citizens and residents. Migrants are welcome, if they are skill trained. Therefore, more than anything, the EU stands for a new Western way of life and if it could manage to turn social mobility into its core business and make it its flagship, then the EU will succeed over the long haul. If it closes its borders and exempts outsiders from enjoying opportunities within the EU it will fail.

The lack of citizenship and no voting rights for refugees, migrants, and non-citizens threaten any sustainable good governance regime—no matter where. If 10% or more of a population has no voting rights, it can threaten inclusive governance, which is the case in most EU countries. In absolute numbers, that means that approx. 45 million people cannot participate legally in political decision-making and hence are overlooked by policymakers, and their voices and interests are unheard during decision-making processes. At the same time, demands for citizens’ participation and dialogues are dramatically rising around the world, but state-driven laws and the way we define citizenships are outdated concepts that prohibit inclusive political participation.⁷

4.1.3 Urbanization

‘I think we no longer need a government,’ Nour, a Lebanese NGO worker, told me in 2021 in Beirut, after Lebanon went through several years of consecutive crises and has become one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. First, the small country had to deal with the flow of refugees from Syria since 2011, then with the economic crisis, with droughts, and in 2020 with the explosion in the harbor in Beirut at the height of the pandemic. ‘We have been organizing everything ourselves here in Beirut over the past years,’ she continued, naming all the public services that either IOs or CSOs or the citizens themselves have been organizing and providing to citizens. There is no state, no law enforcement, and no public service. All services are either privatized or provided by external donors and civil society.

Carla, another NGO employee, says that ‘we can see now how Lebanon turns into a camping State,’ as people move from one refugee camp to the next, without any state authorities being aware of it, let alone stopping it; hence voting rights can no longer be granted, because people are not registered in one place. They no longer participate in state elections. Once the hope for democracy in the Middle East, Lebanon is no longer even an electoral democracy, to begin with, because no one goes to the elections, let alone anyone being interested in them. The only stakeholders who matter in these ample ‘camping grounds’ are international aid and faith-based organization, donors, and remittances from abroad.

Rapid urbanization goes along with the rising number of angry young people who feel deprived of their opportunities. Megacities and urban dwellings resemble glocality’s state of the art in the most elusive way. Global Urbanism, as it is also called, refers to the fact that our modern cities and settlements are shaped somewhat by the outside, by migrants and its level of diversity and the flow of ideas coming to the cities, instead of from inside. In 2010, the OECD published a guidebook for urban governance in which it highlights the needs of local stakeholders, namely to ‘(…) deal with internal tensions and imbalances within urban areas, which generates functional and social segregation and negative territorial spillovers (…) and to overcome (..), the lack of critical mass in medium-sized cities which require innovative forms of inter-municipal coordination (…).’ The OECD emphasizes the importance of dealing with (…) The lack of capacity of local governments (financial, legal, institutional). (…) and instead ‘(…) aligned with central government public policies through an effective multi-level government framework.’ Apart from the MSA, the Economic Organizations recommends using horizontal cooperation between ministries in the central authority and adhering to best practices globally of local urban governance. The MSA encourages CSOs’ engagement, citizen dialogues, public–private partnerships, and other forms—breaking down central government silos and challenging the autocratic elite, which they conclude is key to optimizing the development and impact of spatial strategies.

Back in Beirut, in August 2020, the ICRC and volunteers took care of the wounded after the harbor explosion destroyed large parts of the city, and today, all refurbishing works of the city are financed by a mix of international donors and foreign embassies, especially the French, the German, and the US. 70% of school children have been out of public schooling since the pandemic started, and those who receive education go to private schools. Inflation is over 100%, and the dollar has become the only valid currency in the county. There is noise everywhere in the streets of Beirut, coming from privately run generators and water trolleys, offering electricity and clean water to those who can afford it. Public services have been privatized, and the traffic lights no longer run because local governments cannot pay for the electricity. Beirut is a laboratory for glocal governance. The governmental silos are long broken down and are hollow, but Lebanon remains a recognized state with all its functions.

Beirut is only the beginning, because anocratic governments are no longer able or willing to keep up with the paradigms’ shifts. With over 60% of the world’s population living in urban areas and cities, it makes cities a separate and local governance unit beyond Nation-States. The concepts of green cities, human rights cities, digital cities, smart cities, climate-neutral cities, inclusive cities, and sanctuary cities—to name but a few—are some of the recent innovative and yet practical examples. The EU supports human rights and refugee welcoming city projects.⁸ We do not read the same about countries. Cities seem to have taken over the function of states. Inclusive and climate-neutral city programs and sanctuary cities are growing in the US and elsewhere in the world.

If the city is the new state, then mayors and town counselors are the key governments of our times. Together they resemble ‘compressed modernity,’ doing everything more interconnected, faster, and more diverse (Harrikari & Rauhala, 2019). Local actors such as city mayors and private enterprises, youth organizations and volunteers, city councilors, technocrats, and media, meet and interact with IGOs and other global actors directly. During the refugee flow in 2015, we have seen in Europe how city counselors bypass national laws, even ignore, violate, and at the most complement state regulations to help people waiting at their gates. Cities are more independent than ever; they collect and spend taxes locally, initiate incentives for business, and have become vital fixers of today’s global problems. More commonly, a period of inter-municipal collaboration has paved the way for the successful consolidation of local councils into either a single-tier or a two-tier system. It means multi-level governance among different municipalities being part of a bigger city such as the two-tier governance regime of the 8 million people city of London that consists of various municipalities. In megacities of 10 million people and more, such as Mumbai and Manila, a metropolitan development authority has been created to provide planning and project management. The glocal governance systems are adapted to coordinate more actors to deliver better services and effectively implement policy and strategy. The sources of political powers have become more diffuse, but city leaders and elected mayors have gained the ability to bypass national systems to network globally with other cities (Moonen et al., 2014, p. 15). One of these networks is the C40. It is a network of mayors of the largest cities (C40) in the world who have built a global network to collaborate and commit and implement city-driven GND with the help of the UN and EU incentives, announcing determined actions from all its 100 city members, including Beijing, Guangzhou and Bangkok, Abidjan and Durban, London and Berlin, Delhi and Mumbai, Jakarta and Melbourne, and Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, as well as New York. At least 30 cities in the network experience severe pressure and revolts from citizens to improve the cities’ health standards because of pollution. It is the cities that must fix the problem, because governments are unwilling or overwhelmed in doing so. Some of these cities are among the dirtiest globally and suffer energy shortages, such as Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan or Delhi in India. They experience pressure from CSOs, but at the same time, have not managed to change the corrupt and hierarchical governance regime that prevents them from responding to the emergency. Nevertheless, the plethora of city and citizens networks that emerged over the past 20 years is breathtaking, telling us one thing, namely that over 60% of the world population is no longer willing to wait until corrupt and dysfunctional state authorities deliver and respond to the needs of their citizens. Peter Taylor describes these rapidly rising numbers of city networks as the ‘skeleton’ upon which globalization is built, and by this, political and territorial boundaries become redundant (2003).

We count over 100 global and regional city networks today, most of them located in the world’s largest and most industrial continent, namely Eurasia. The largest networks are called WeGo, the World Smart Sustainable City Organization, the International Network for Urban Development, not to mention the thousands of regional and global city partnerships seen in exchange programs and national city networks. The one purpose they have in common is the guided exchange and mobility of people and the idea of managing local public affairs according to shared global norms and standards. City councilors, local businesses, and CSOs can react faster and are more responsive to people in their city.

To illustrate more vital locality vis-a-vis the state, using Wallerstein and Roudometof’s concept of glocality, is the example of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. Land-locked, poor in resources with a Soviet-style industry, the country depends on over two million migrant workers’ remittances every year. These ‘Transnational villagers’ send remittances to keep their families alive, donate money to religious groups, invest in houses, wedding ceremonies, cars, and smartphones, and by these contribute to glocalization through migrations. The UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers from 1990 had already planned to pay tribute to their precarious situation and lack of rights, but without much success among its member states, and it only came into force in 2003. The governments have failed to deliver any of the public’s needs. Higher education is largely privatized, and the public sector has either not been reformed or corrupted. The health sector depends on donations and charity from Turkey and China and IGOs and local volunteers, and the security sector is left in the hands of the former hegemon and colonizer Russia. The public sector depends entirely on the external sector, whereas the rest is privatized. The only hope for many local businesses to survive is through global investments. However, if state authorities do not control these investments, they lead to anything but prosperity. An example again can be found in Kyrgyzstan, where a decade ago, a Turkish company invested in local farming, improved infrastructure, diversified farming, and increased productivity in the region of Talas. This increased income, the quality of food, and subsequently health. People no longer needed to migrate to Russia to make a living. At the same time, child labor rose to 40% because it was more beneficial for families to send their children to the fields than to school (Tilekeyev, 2013).

However, it is not only the informal economic sector and the rise of OC, the lack of tax collection, and migration that has dramatically eroded statehood in the post-Soviet space elsewhere, but also the willful destruction and negligence of what was left of it since the country’s independence in 1991. Moreover, it is the common understanding that governments and political regimes come and go over the centuries, and so do their elites, and in the end, the only reliable source of income and social deliverables is family and the local community. Statehood, let alone a democratic one, is alien to what people experience, namely the satisfaction of basic needs.

Coming back to the example of Kyrgyzstan and its capital of Bishkek since 1991, the city council has not been able to build a single cultural building, which is a sad record: 0 museums, 0 planetariums, 0 theaters, 0 libraries, and 0 cultural centers and 0 music schools, 0 painting schools and only one art object of a ‘heroic kind’—that represent patriarchy in the form of a mythical warrior called Manas. Culture is often the clue that keeps local communities together, and if most cultural events and sculptures are privately sponsored by banks and businesses, or donated by locals and foreign embassies, then it is a statement about the stability of statehood. Instead, many cultural buildings, parks, and museums were destroyed to make room for new money laundering condo projects financed by dubious private investors and OC. At the same time, since 1991, dozens of mosques and madrassas (religious schools) were built, replacing the role of theaters and libraries and public schools sponsored by foreign countries and faith-based organizations. By this, local actors and stakeholders became more embedded in a reorganization of preferences and autonomous decision-making, albeit being twisted between a non-caring-state and external foreign dependence (Niemeyer, 2011, p. 124). Urban transformation, once from fortresses to multicultural settlements, is key to understanding contemporary urbanizations. Nowhere else can we see this development as fast as in new urban settlements.

In 2020 in Reno, the US State of Nevada wanted to become the first glocal city of its kind. The state government wanted to declare the city as new ‘investment zones’ with a separate governance unit, where people can trade with cryptocurrency, CEOs get de jure power over the wellbeing of that zone, and public office elections would no longer take place. Tech companies run the entire county if they invest 1.5 million US dollars and privatize education and health. Eventually the governors idea was blocked and voted down—for now. But it is only a matter of time until Big-Tech companies and online platforms have turned into indispensable glocal informants that together with CSOs and NSAs will operate below or above state regulations and run their own glocal city states.

Today cities and their representatives set their bylaws for sustainable business and investments, working conditions and education, and no longer keep the city’s wealth safe and protect it from invaders. Undoubtedly, modern cities have limitations in the core fields of statehood, namely boundaries, currency, and defense. Municipalities adapt quicker to global discussions and facilitate cross-city learning, and hence become a more resilient space to live in and serve as protection against future crises. During the mass migration in the Middle East in 2015 and the pandemic 2020–2022, city majors, local school authorities, and businesses helped and provided basic needs for migrants and those getting infected with the virus. They responded faster and more efficiently than state governments could do.

Furthermore, urban space is the new resource for growth overall because e-commerce is more likely to fund there than in rural areas and because it attracts people with skills and innovative potential. E-commerce requires constant exchange of ideas and innovation, which takes place in urban settlements and needs space for experiments. Urban growth can be climate neutral, digital, and sustainable simultaneously. Strikingly enough, in 2021, the world’s largest Architectural Exhibit, the Venice Biennale Architettura, chose the topic: ‘How will we live together?’ focusing on urban dwellings and proposing glocal city life. Over 100 Nations submitted their ideas on the future of sustainable and renewable cities and architecture and presented their visions for urban settlers’ ways of life and quality of life. Not surprisingly, the exhibits presented a merged concept of the way of life of the East and the West, ranging from green and AI-based smart, ‘inclusive, degrowth zone’ to unitarian, family-friendly, and safer urban space. That year’s Biennale Awards went to city concepts that combined human dignity and architecture under the slogan of ‘flexible and open space for more inclusive experiments,’⁹ and by that, turning city counselors into de facto ‘state builders’ of the future (2021).

Another development over the past decades is the rise of sanctuary and emancipatory cities and their agents. In the light of the dramatic rise of global mobility, in 2017, New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio, and the major of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, together with the major of Danzig, Pawel Adamowicz, announced that they would go their ways and implement policies concerning migration and climate-neutral cities, against state policies and their governments. Along with other global and multi-level partnerships, they initiated sanctuary cities around the world, taking a critical stand beyond or alongside national politics and state limitations when integrating children of migrants in schooling, providing housing and work, language courses, quickly and non-bureaucratically. These city mayors knew that if they waited for governments to resolve these problems, inequality and exclusion would trigger tensions among local citizens and lead to local violence and crimes. Local community leaders, such as these city mayors, have received more autonomy over the years; they can form tax regimes and bureaucracy depending on interests, problem-solving issues, and organization. Localizing matters of public policy also has the adverse side effects of corruption, blackmailing, organized crimes abusing public funding and running public sectors, and other problems due to a lack of established and legitimate leadership structures. The point of analysis is that a growing number of cities worldwide have taken governmental functions into their hand and started governing independently from state governments. In Europe’s largest city, for example, Moscow, with over 13 million inhabitants and a Soviet-style top-down city and an autocratic national government, glocal governance initiatives face massive obstacles and lead to fragmentation of the city instead. The city’s local business and economy have been based on military production, and with a welfare service provided only to the worker-residents of the Soviet period. To transit to a timelier decentralized, diverse, open space, and local approaches have caused major cleavages and conflicts. Turning the city into a green and modern IT city would have demanded a governance capacity combining both expertise and a planning horizon that is very different from the nepotistic anocratic system of the past. As a result, ICTs, business, and the new economy have moved to other sections of the city and hence have fragmented this city because there was no autonomous city planning by the city council, since Moscow is under the de facto control of the central government. Eventually due to the incapability to adapt to global changes, this decision, led to more fragmentization of society instead of inclusion.¹⁰

4.2 Endogenous Dynamics

The endogenous factors are seen in the rapid growth of population to 8 billion inhabitants worldwide and subsequently youth mobilization and digitalization (Bache, 2004). The above-shown inter-exchangeability between human rights holders and duty bearers accelerates the dynamics of these factors, giving individual persons and businesses, as well as CSOs and IOs, a more decisive role in governance and eventually making the state redundant.¹¹

IGOs like the OHCHR have already established Master Plans to introduce small steps to enhance and increase compliance with international norms, such as human rights, in a world where states are no longer able, or the government is no longer willing, to comply with them. The fact that only approx. 16% of all UN member states and their governments respond to their own set of human rights norms and rules in their domestic constitutions, and 84% do not respond or adhere to international norms, speaks for itself.

Endogenous factors originate internally from within a country and a state. They are symptoms by which we see whether states and governance regimes adhere to democratic and human rights principles. However, there is no scientific evidence that bad or good governance or any regime type needs the redistribution of dominant elites (North et al., 2009). Many factors indeed contribute to the status quo of a state or a governance unit in today’s Digital Anthropocene.

4.2.1 Digitalization

The year 2000 was a tipping point to introduce the Anthropocene and the ‘era of a man-made planet,’ and for digitalization and the ‘digital age’ and the widespread use of ICT—both go hand in hand. Some 20 years later, the urgency to regulate digitalization is critical on any government’s agenda, and in 2022, the member states have started negotiations on a global treaty to combat cybercrime.

The digital Anthropocene has two sides: what people can destroy; they may also fix it again? Milanovic (2018) redefines growth, focusing on how we reduce inequality, instead of looking at economic growth. A capitalist economy growth is the concentration of capital in specific industrial sectors, even in new technologies. In the Anthropocene, shared e-economy, digital transparency, and horizontal governance may lead to a different understanding of growth—so the assumption. We can see this by the actions toward global supply chain policies, sustainable markets, and shared responsibilities among and with all those contributing to production chains.¹² A group of researchers at the University of Amsterdam investigated the allocation of international responsibility among multiple states and stakeholders and identified multi-level stakeholder responsibilities of problem-solving and sharing responsibility in an increasingly interdependent and heterogeneous international legal order. From a normative perspective, the Digital Anthropocene goes hand in hand with a plethora of global norms and international law, aiming to regulate it for example in Article 19 of the UN ICCPR and Article 10 of the European Convention for Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, or Article 9 of the African Union (AU) Banjul Charter for Human Rights, and Article 13 of the American Convention of Human Rights of the OAS. The articles articulate the right to freedom of expression, which includes seeking, receiving, and imparting information, in the ICT-driven digital economy. But these provisions also allow governments to limit the right to information for a legitimate purpose such as state security or privacy of a person. Governments respond often in two ways: either censor and block the Internet or give up control. To overcome this lack of control, governments have started to share power with private enterprises, developers, providers, and users, both de jure and de facto, to gain back partial control over cyberspace.

In 2000, there were roughly 400 million Internet/ICT users, or ‘digital citizens,’ and 20 years later, we counted 4 billion, which is half of the world’s (overall young) population (Mihr, 2017). In Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia, Internet penetration is over 80%, and in Africa, it is the lowest, but still 70%, with rapid growth tendencies. Over the next decade, more than 90% of the world’s population will have access to the Internet and spend most parts of his/her life in cyberspace. Wikipedia, Google, Meta, Weibo, and YouTube are essential for our day-to-day work and personal interactions. Looking back to what change theory tells us, the 30% threshold of digitalization and access to the Internet has long passed and hence the Internet can be considered major endogenous factors for a paradigm shift. Meta is on the way to being the primary governor of the new global, virtual cyber world of 4 billion users/citizens. The company is installing not only its own rules and regulations, but it also provides for its security and even currency, a bitcoin ‘diem,’ and an AI-based law and enforcement algorithm that controls and protects users’ data and behavior. It has its e-commerce and e-economy platforms, and hence already operates like a de facto supranational and super territorial state. The main caveats are that it is not governed democratically and lacks powerful and legitimate mechanisms for accountability and participation.

Against this backdrop, the number of Internet users and the population (growth) in a country matter for how we will be governed in the future. The bigger the country or the more significant Meta gets, the more centralized the power will become. Decentralized and federal states, where provinces, districts, cities, and local communities already enjoy high levels of autonomy, democracy is getting stronger, not weaker. Another phenomenon is that in the Digital Anthropocene, the most active citizens are below 30. The International Business Standard Organizations estimated that over 10 million registered NGOs and an equal number of CSOs and start-ups or small medium-size enterprises that altogether make up 2 billion people who operate as grassroots activists thanks to the Internet.¹³ Many of these activists and workers have never met in person, even though they work in the same ‘virtual office’ and 1:2 working persons are today involved in e-commerce and digital enterprise.

Notwithstanding, one can say that the Digital Anthropocene is a youth rebellion against the traditional economy, and it is rapidly progressing. Digitalization is earmarked by the rapid global dissemination of nanotechnology, quantum computing, and AI that determine the collection and use of big data, robotics, the Internet of Things, and 5G networks, and that penetrates everyone’s daily life.

There is more to this new era for humankind: it makes us universal citizens—for example, the role of pop culture and its global dissemination through streaming and social networks. From streaming services to online platforms and the leisure industry, it dramatically affects our perceptions, attitude, habits, language, and subsequently our culture. In the most remote places globally, we see people wearing shirts with NASA and names of cities and universities in Europe or the US that they never went to. The use of (mostly) English phrases and emojis have become a universal language, in the digital world. Young digital natives today read at least one or more world languages—Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, French, or English—and for the rest use free software translation Apps.

In 2019, the 2012 Hollywood fantasy series ‘Hunger Games’ turned into a blueprint for youth to protest against corrupt authoritarian regimes in Thailand. The movie’s protagonists use the ‘three fingers’ as a symbol of protest, and used as a sign in the protests against the corrupt military regime and monarchy in Thailand. It went so far that the series became a source of justification for the ‘Future-Forward-Party’ of the Thai businessman Thanathorb Juanggoongruangkit, who led the third strongest party in parliament in his first run. He resembles, among many, the fight of the young, mobile, and glocal players fighting against traditional ethnonationalist (military) elite men. According to Rustow’s concept of ‘shared fundamental matters,’ this pop culture fantasy series has triggered protests accross the world with the common aim to change modes of governance.

Other than global visions such as the ‘world parliament of men and women,’ some modes of glocal governance might not even resemble parliamentarian or otherwise democratic regimes—particularly in the virtual cyber continent (Kennedy, 2006). The same is true for the claim of a World Human Rights Court. Although desirable and seen as an advancement vis-à-vis corrupt and disempowered domestic courts, a World Court would work under traditional albeit extended and shared-responsibility terms of state jurisdiction. Other than the earlier theories of globalization and cultural transformation that still see functional state institutions as key to stability and based on global modernity (Robertson, 1992), the dynamics of digitalization and the immediate and rapid exchange of people’s views fundamentally change our concept of justice in all matters. Benedikter & Giordano argue that ICT and digitalization have globally virtualized our social sphere. It has become an ‘outer process of transition’ joined by an ‘inner transformational drive.’ It is a combination between the virtual and the local and individual. The state is deprived of its crucial function or is willing to share it with an algorithm-driven system. In 2021, China piloted the first automated algorithm-driven prosecution mechanism to investigate, identify petty crimes, charge verdicts, and issue penalties without a defendant ever seeing a judge or a courtroom. ICT and social media have changed the outer dimension of how we perceive, interpret, and handle our social lives and seek justice. It is thus transforming our habits of cultural consumption, and contemporary brain and consciousness research are changing the inner dimension of contemporary social life by dramatically re-shaping self-perception and interpretation of the individual. This happens through the findings, cultural distribution, and practical applications of neuroscience, thus questioning the conceptual cornerstones of sociality as conceived by Western societies (Benedikter & Giordano, 2011).

Hence, similar to the democratization movements in the nineteenth century, today’s level of education and access to information via ICT determines whether a society meets the ‘background conditions’ (Rustow) to articulate its wish for fundamental change. After the background conditions are set, the endogenous spiral to glocal governance comes into speed; first, by exclaiming the wish for change and social mobilization and organization of groups; second, through secularization and the increasing equal access to political education and information that determines the setup of glocal governance. Thirdly, the Digital Anthropocene follows the visions of individual empowerment, and the slogan ‘You can do it if you want it’ gives the illusion of equal opportunities and social mobility. Fourthly and lastly, only in this diverse and self-critical and constantly rotating, reforming, and moving regime will innovation flourish and solutions to global challenges be found.

Against this backdrop, Schäfer and Merkel (2020) describe a modern concept of deliberative democracy and conclude that the independence of (social) media, existing mechanisms of communication between weak and robust public groups, structural opportunities for participation, such as access to the Internet, and, finally, culturally predominant hierarchies of evaluation must exist, if democratic modes of governance want to survive. The Digital Anthropocene is marked by a type of business management governance regime in which elected policymakers act like CEOs, and citizens often are considered clients and customers. Again, we can learn from Science Fiction as a forward-looking reflection and metaphor for the present.

Blockbuster science fiction movies such as ‘Iron Man 2’ from 2010, sometimes become surprisingly real some decades later. In ‘Iron Man 2’ the world-saving, never sleeping, entertaining, technically sophisticated, half-robot half-man hero, is finally held accountable for his actions in front of a hearing by US Congress. Iron Man responds to an inquisitive hearing committee on Capitol Hill about his mercenary intervention in Afghanistan with, ‘I did you a big favor: I have successfully privatized world peace!’ He believes he has glocalized the world and brought peace to it. In the movie, Iron Man is questioned by the democratically elected policymakers of the US congress. These elected parliamentarians are ironically portrayed as overweighed, grey-haired, old white men who resembled the old world—the pre-Anthropocene. Iron Man has a massive fandom worldwide. As it turns out, the protagonist does not want to abolish the democratic system but to reform it from within and make it more glocal. There is a happy ending for democracy at the end of the film, but at the same time it undermines the current form of parliamentarianism. Foreseeing or not, in this version of Iron Man, multi billionaire and Space entrepreneur, Elon Musk, appears in a scene, promising money to Iron Man’s peace missions in the world. Ten years later, during the war in Ukraine in 2022, Musk turned the fiction into reality and provided free Starlink satellite systems for Ukrainians and hence was the first investor to privatize a country’s war defense in modern times. And in the height of the war, the Ukrainian President started a glocal crowdfunding campaign United24 for financing the war and the reconstructions of the devastated country. In the same vein, promoting glocalism is the 2018 African Fantasy Science Fiction blockbuster ‘Black Panther.’ In the movie, the panther resembles Iron Man and sends the same message across the world, namely that glocal power does not need democracy. A world-saving male hero, successful salesmen and AI scientist (thanks to his sister), and yet somewhat philanthropic and human rights loving handsome gentlemen and romancer, saves world peace and African black identity and dignity against evil (white and black) forces. Victorious at last, he saves the self-determination of his people beyond any corrupt statehood, but he denies them democracy. He is the absolute king and ruler based on hereditary power and then later by victory in single combat while taking unilateral decisions with the help of a woman, his scientifically emancipated and empowered sister. These science fiction and fantasy blockbusters idealize the privatization of peace and prosperity of societies, and by this they are holding a mirror to the world.

4.2.2 Non-state Actors and Civil Society

The individual is the key actor in the Digital Anthropocene, and the individualization of power has created a strange combination of dysfunctional state institutions, civil society, business, and non-state actors (NSA) that together manage and sometimes govern the commons within and beyond state borders. By no means is this combination of stakeholders anarchical, but often act outside state institutions and hence they lack of effective enforcement mechanisms. In the quest for who is governing the commons and public sectors in a glocal world, Haller et al. (2019) note the rising demand for centralistic, primarily male, law-and-order populist-ethnic-nationalistic leaders emerging, and strangely enough, often backed by CSOs and NSAs at the same time.

Among the weak and dysfunctional states, we find those elected or appointed governments have lost de facto and de jure control over territory. That power vacuum is taken mainly by individual stakeholders, sometimes CSOs and NSAs. Public services erode, and so do state authority and sovereignty. The security sectors, for example, such as police or gendarmerie, can no longer protect citizens from external threats or fraud, let alone protect women from domestic violence and children from abuse, nor keep them safe within their homes and cities. They behave like predators, taking bribes and intimidating people. At that stage, the system has reached an ultimate level of dysfunctionality. The bargain citizens make with their governments to keep them from any harm, in exchange for allegiance and taxation—is broken when there is no trust in authorities.

Countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Mali, and Chad, or Yemen and Afghanistan and Myanmar, where non-elected bodies, paramilitaries, and warlords take over the security sector and de facto state control, the public sector such as schooling and health care are taken over by IGOs, privatized or run by CSOs. Hence, the state has no longer any de facto control over the commons, let alone taxation and human security. Corrupt state leaders do not have any interest and taking back control over these sectors and are much too happy to see international donors and aid agencies to ‘replace’ statehood. While political elites plunder their countries, they allow international donors to maintain what is left of the state. This type of failed statehood we find in one way or the other, in enclaves, such as in the Fergana Valley between Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and occupied and separatist enclaves of Abkhazia Georgia and Russia or the Donbas between Russia and Ukraine. The same is true for non-recognized states such as Palestine or Somaliland. The only functioning institutions in these countries are often kinstate agents, international donors, charity organizations, faith-based organizations, CSOs, or IGOs, such as the UN, the OSCE, International Relief Council, UNICEF, or UNHCR. In Gaza, for example, UNWRA, the UN Relief and Works Agency, finances schools, distributes daily food, and runs the business. The entire existence of the city-state depends on international donors, and do not follow governmental rules. In Kosovo, after a bloody war from 1989 to 1999, the OSCE and international donor organizations managed to maintain a minimum level of state duties, including garbage collection and public administration, for over a decade before the country declared independence.

The UNHCR estimates today that there are between 4 and 10 million stateless people around the world that get their public services through international organizations. Furthermore, the OECD in its Fragility Report 2020 estimates that there are 2 billion people, that is 1:4 of the total world population, living in states that are failed or for most parts are dysfunctional. These people work informally and have no safety guarantees, let alone benefit from public sectors such as affordable health care or free education. Uprooted and forced to migrate, add approximately another 1.5 billion to these numbers and together round up, to 40% of the worlds’ population that has no access to public services and full participatory rights and/or has so at an insufficient level. When adding the number of people living under totalitarian leadership, we can estimate that approximately 60% of the world’s population is governed by dysfunctional, corrupt, suppressive, illegitimate, and violent regimes. This figure marks a tipping point of ‘dysfunctional regime’ against which we must see today’s glocal paradigm shifts and youth rebellion.

In Central Asia and Africa, where we find most dysfunctional states, it is the two biggest private foundation, namely the Agha Khan Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which steps in to pay for and provide public services. For the Middle East, it is the Abu Dhabi Fund, and for the post soviet space the Soros Foundation, and in South America, the Inter-American Foundation often step in where governments fail to deliver and hence intentionally or not, they replace state services. These private actors collaborate with state institutions and international financial institutions, such as the Asian, and Islamic Development Bank, the European Union Development Funds, and the World Bank. It is a form of glocal PPP that has become the norm, not the exception, but at the same time it has dramatically eroded statehood as we knew it.

Ironically or not, even NSAs such as warlords or rebel groups often benefit from schools, hospitals, and infrastructural facilities built with development aid. They expropriate and take control over these facilities and by this excercise a form of ‘piracy of public goods.’ NSAs violently abduct and misuse these facilities which, ironically again, have been funded by Western charity or donors that aimed to promote human rights and good governance principles. After the takeover by warlords, these principles are violated in two ways, first by the abduction of the facilities, and secondly by breaching universal norms. In the province of Tigray in Ethiopia, after the takeover by NSAs in 2021, the public facilities by private and international donors were deliberately kept intact to provide for the needs of people. It is a dilemma for both sides, the IGOs/CSOs that remain in a land governed by NSAs, do not share any common values with the warlords but they stay for humanitarian reasons. Through mutual tolerance and endurance, both sides follow their cause, the IGOs provide humanitarian aid that can be continued without interference by NSAs; on the other hand, warlords continue to reign over the territory. This is not sustainable, but it seems a Gordian Knot, unable to loosen for now.

For that reason, one of the largest international donors in the field of governance, the EU, has reduced and partially stopped its aid in regions governed by NSAs. In 2021, after the collapse of the government in Afghanistan, NSA such as, the Taliban, ISIS, Northern Alliances Al-Qaida, and other OC groups filled the power gap. They seized what NATO/ISAF troops and the donor community had left behind. The Taliban established a Sharia law-based Emirate, and at the same time, urged international donors to stay in the country to take care of the public sector because they themselves are either unwilling or incapable of governing it. How a warlord regime wants to build a state only on force and terror remains a secret, but as long as they receive money through drug trafficking and the new ally, China, the system can remain stable for some time. Warlords are remarkably good at conceding international norms but without the slightest interest in forming a government according to them.

Another political actor that fills power gaps accross the world is China. It does not require any democratic or human rights conditionality. It is seen as another player in the big power games, a colonizer at the most, rather than an occupier. Along with the dysfunctionalities of 50% of the world’s states, not surprisingly, NSA, warlords, and OC govern a quarter of the world’s economy today, and hence have a significant impact on how glocality develops (Schönenberg, 2013). They act outside, below, or above the state radar, most formed in mafia-type structures and oligarchic forms. Warlords like the Taliban, ISIS in Asia, Boko Haram or the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, and the Maras in Central America are only the most brutal and violent faces of these NSAs. However, underneath, there are many other more minor clan and family-based networks. They often share religious, linguistic, geographical, historical, ethnic, and blood ties, that serve as ‘constitutional bounds’ deeply rooted in devotion and locality and if these bounds are broken they get severely punished by other members of the community.¹⁴

Organized crime groups have become political actors; they run transnational enterprises in public sectors and even fight state authorities with legal means in courts. They bribe and blackmail democratic decision-makers, parliamentarians, ministers, and city mayors and hence de facto run much of a country’s public sector. They have successfully increased their influence within the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. From the moment they aim to play with legitimate institutions such as the IMF, they come out of the deep state forced in making concessions according to global norms.

But the increasing role of OC and oligarchs in state-building and governance curbed the term Secondary Cities. These are vastly growing cities between 1 and 3 million inhabitants, often in peripheries of a country, with ‘illegal’ settlements and slum dwellers. State authorities often have little or no presence in these cities or neighbourhoods. Their city counselors often rather connect with international donors and organizations than with state institutions, to get things done. By this, they not only undermine statehood, but they also shape the geography and economy of the region in which they grow. This is de facto a form of glocal state building. These cities are at the state’s margin and give room for improvization. Local commerce, trading routes, and smuggling networks determine the economics more than the capital cities of these countries (Roberts, 2014). In Secondary Cities, local warlords and businessmen often control or co-councel public matters, such as the ‘Maras’ in the metropolis of San Pedro Sula in Honduras, where everyone has to pass through them to run for office or to establish a business. In Kenya, for example, so called ‘big businessmen,’ go as far as running and entire city in the Makueni County, south of Nairobi. There they are controlling de facto and de jure the entire territory and the people that live of mining. It is here, as in many other parts of the world, that only humanitarian or aid organizations like the ‘Kenya Water Partnership,’ who resolve water supply issues, can enter the territory without being killed.

The same happens in India, where the ‘Sand Mafias’ control parts of the coastal territory and have bribed state authorities and killed hundreds of people who tried to stop them in recent years. They operate below state radar but also triggered necessary glocal forms of governance far from any democratic principles or human rights compliance. These local Mafias’ biggest competitors are state-run cartels, such as drug traffickers collaborating with autocratic states, like China and Russia. A cheap synthetic drug, such as Fentanyl, from Chinese laboratories, for example, has challenged drug trafficking cartels from Afghanistan via Russia to Europe. Traditionally, 80% of all narcotics came from Afghanistan, but Fentanyl is cheaper, and it is trafficked via the BRI to Europe and hence poses a threat to the steady income of OC such as the Taliban and the Russian-Central Asian Mafia and brotherhoods. People in these countries seem to adapt easily and try to avoid politics. According to the 2021 WVS, 71% of people worldwide are more concerned about a ‘stable economy’ and ‘more humane society’ than about any ‘progress toward a society in which Ideas count more than money’ (10%) or the ‘fight against crime’ (16%).¹⁵ Hence, if NSAs provide for the basic needs and respond to the critical desires of people, they enjoy a reasonable level of support and can remain in power for a remarkable time. The survey also reveals that NSAs have become part and partial of the glocalization processes and should be seen as one of many stakeholders in the game to get the complete analytical picture of glocality.

The biggest threat to NSAs are functioning democratic regimes, and hence this is one of the reasons why NSAs fight democracy and human rights. In his work on Gangsters and Other Statemen, Mandic investigated how OC and mafia deliberately undermine efforts of state-building, for example, in South Ossetia and Kosovo. They intentionally fuel ethnic conflicts and separation, and eventually wars, to continue their business with trafficking and smuggling (Mandic, 2021). Therefore, in most post-communist states, the OCs are omnipresent, and often it is not clear who is a warlord, who is a member of OC, and who is an elected policymaker. Since independence in 1991, many former soviet republics never gained complete control over the country’s economy, nor the public or security sector. In the same line, even within the EU, we see Hungary’s governments using public EU funds to establish a de facto deep Mafia State. In 2019 the European State attorney in Luxemburg filed a claim against Hungary, accusing it of being run by an oligarchic family with an OC structure. The Deep States, often run by populist or clerical leaders, are on the rise wherever democracy does not deliver to the needs of people. In 2019 the estimated flow of money that went into GPD and through the hands of NSAs went up to 4.2 billion dollars. Most of it is laundered through real estate and cybercrime. Counterfeiting is the most profitable criminal act used by NSA, with an estimated value between US$ 930 billion and US$ 1.5 trillion annually. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of these counterfeited goods came from China. The money is laundered through online gambling, fake accounts, the housing market, and tax fraud through big companies. In conclusion, NSAs have already become vital glocal players in the formal and informal sectors of all sorts.¹⁶ Transnational OC groups alone has reached over 3 trillion dollars of revenues each year, twice as much as all military budgets in the world, and hence are not without reason seen as one of the key global players.¹⁷

The Russian-Eurasian organized crime groups, the so-called REOCs, are some of the largest internationally operating NSAs groups that conduct business on a large scale, control entire regions, and govern cities. The REOC, for example, organizes all structures of public sectors and addresses the desperate and angry youth in Eurasia. The supply of angry young men seems endless; born in the successor states of the USSR, bound by history, language, traditions in the search for income and identity, they are easy to recruit. They call themselves ‘thieves in the law,’ the ‘obshyak’ (oбщaк) and believe that the deep state is the most effective of all. They operate by their norms and ‘constitutions,’ claiming that they can guarantee security for people, steady income, health, and identity, but only if the people remain subordinate.

Consequently, they replace statehood. They even run their pension funds and insurance system, a community fund fed on illicit funds, which group members can use according to their hierarchy and particular circumstances, but also if a member needs health care and hospitalization.¹⁸ All levels of governance are strictly hierarchically and exclusive. Each member of this exclusive group is obliged to contribute to this community fund that acts as a quasi-tax authority. OC often follows a secret code of honor that works like a pseudo-religion or ideology, and rules are above state laws. Many of these secret codes are related to religious principles, such as respecting and protecting the elders, helping the poor and underprivileged, and protecting women and children. Their members are ready to kill and sacrifice their lives for this code and honor. They offer brotherhood, trust, identity, and a safety net, making them the better alternative to corrupted state authorities and institutions. NSAs are predominantly male, as opposed to the civil society movements that are predominantly female. Apart from the global battle between youth against the old, there is a new dimension in the New Cold War namely the battle of females against male dominance. Collaborative civil society actors have composed an army of millions of volunteers around the globe that teach, treat people, and provide shelter.

Furthermore, most micro-businesses and startups are female. In South-east Asia, 1:3 successful e-commerce and family maintaining income sources are run by women. In the Philippines, that is a highly corrupt and dysfunctional state, it is even 2:3, with a rising tendency including family compatibility. Thanks to male power games that often have a dysfunctional outcome for society, the rise of women in business and the public sector has become vital for daily survival, notably for single mothers.

But from below, CSOs are thriving and many of them led by female or gay and lesbian leaders. In 2019, the US Council of Foreign Relations listed a thrilling rise of CSO-driven protests on a single day alone; in September 2019, 4 million protesters marched against climate change in one day in over 100 cities. In Chile alone, over 1.2 million people went to the street because of the rising cost of public transport; and in Lebanon in the same month, a hundred thousand protested on one day against a WhatsApp Tax. In Puerto Rico, one million citizens protested the censorship of Telegram, and in Hong Kong, in only one day in June 2019, two million people went against the extradition laws imposed by China. All these mass protests have in common: ICT and CSO driven, and with a fast pace that governmental authorities can hardly cope with.

The 2020–2022 pandemic has stirred up much displeasure with the political class and dysfunctional statehood globally. Self-efficacy came through civil society and volunteers who provided much of the social and medical care during the pandemic years. In the highly dysfunctional governed capital of Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, for example, with an estimate of 1.5 million inhabitants, an ‘army’ of 10,000 volunteers, called the Druzhinniki, first helped the infected and weak people during the pandemic and later that year protected shops from looting after mass revolutions against electoral fraud occurred during the parliamentarian elections in October 2020. Police and state officials were hiding in barracks and homes, afraid of doing something wrong in the absence of a functional government. ‘The country turned into a land of volunteers and civic brigades,’ as claimed by a Kyrgyz journalist on Facebook at that time. Volunteers protected shops, drove people to hospitals, distributed sanitizers that mainly were paid out of their pockets. In the aftermath, the interim government, led by a former criminal released from prison with the help of OC, ignored the new youth enthusiasm and instead imposed a strictly presidential regime in 2021. The former president of the country, Rosa Otunbayeva, nevertheless counteracted the widespread disillusion of the youth revolt, asserting that one cannot speak of an end to democracy but rather that Kyrgyz society is experiencing growing pains that will mobilize new forces. In her view, the educated and knowledgeable youth will not go backward but will fight, take risks, make sacrifices, move and drive political processes forward (Replication-Receiver, 2020). But what if the youth leave the country by the millions to work abroad and send back remittances? Who will stay to make the changes? There is not enough critical mass to trigger change for democracy according to change theory. One should not forget that the backsliding of democracies and the shrinking space for CSOs and human rights defenders reached a peak in 2021 also due to the fact that the youth often immigrated or were forcibly silenced.

The pandemic revealed many dusty covers that made us believe that countries develop democratically. On the contrary, under cover of democratic constitutions, they moved toward autocracies, and one way to break the downward spiral is the glocalization of local communities. For example, during the autumn 2020 Nagorno Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, institutions like the ICRC were not allowed to look for missing soldiers and prisoners of war on either side. Eventually, desperate families turned to Facebook as a last resort, launching sides and platforms to exchange information across the battle lines to find their sons and spouces. Facebook became unintentionally a private corporate peacebuilder.

In the atrocious 2022 Russian War on Ukraine, the US tech giant, science fiction fan, and billionaire, Elon Musk has been supporting the military and civilian population in Ukraine with his satellite Internet service Starlink, as a personal contribution to strengthen the Ukrainian defense. He was not only glocalizing the war, but also responding to a request from Ukraine’s Minister of Digitalization. He had contacted Musk directly via Twitter and ask him to help. And immediately after the war broke out, Japanese entrepreneur and billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani donated to Ukraine eight million euros as emergency aid without any conditionalities. International support for Ukrainians, interventions and sanction on Russia, private and governmental, has reached a never seen solidarity around the world, and turned this war into the first glocal war in the twenty-first century, marking a paradigm shift for the New World Order to come.

Moreover, the social network platform users responded to the claims, turning into the neutral players in the conflict to find missing persons. Facebook allowed the families on both sides to put pictures of their husbands and sons on Facebook and ask, in various languages, whether anyone had seen them? Many of them appeared and were reported to their families, and some of them eventually returned in a prisoner exchange.¹⁹ Similarly, in 2019, after heavy monsoon floods in Mumbai, Google started an early warning system when programmers set up an App for people to allow them to pass safely and dry through the city. People were finding it hard to navigate through most streets that had been flooded, and in the absence of the city and governmental, citizens turned to Google.²⁰ Who controls the Internet controls the world, seems to be real, and when in 2021 Facebook turned into Mega Platform, Meta, its manager Nick Clegg, a former British Deputy Prime Minister, announced in a blog entry that this investment is a vote of confidence in its strength.

Yet, ICT giants, such as Twitter and Meta, used by CSOs and NSAs alike, are undermining the legitimacy of state authorities. Digital players, like Twitter, have become, non-elected and non legitimized policymakers, interfering dramatically in public policy and electoral campaigns. In January 2021, after massive public protests, the company suspended the account of acting president Donald Trump for his alleged support for the violent attack on Capitol Hill, hence democracy, in Washington DC. Facebook and others followed, claiming that the president’s tweets fueled hate disinformation and were, therefore, a threat to ‘orderly transition’ from one presidency to the next. Twitter and Facebook are not democratically legitimated actors, let alone impartial judges, but they nevertheless decided unilaterally, breaching democratic standards and often international human rights law, too. The action was justified by the company’s CEO to stop ‘glorification of violence and to prevent the country from further harm.’

Ex-President Trump filed a lawsuit on ‘free speech infringement’ against Twitter, Facebook, and Google for censoring his posts, claiming that their action violated law and basic standards of liberal democracy. A similar case happened in September 2020 when Twitter unilaterally suspended the account of the Hungarian government temporarily. Twitter’s CEO explained later that the company did not agree with the government’s and President Orban’s hateful anti-migration policies justifying his concept of ‘illiberal democracy.’ The government went against Twitter, arguing that it is not the tech giant’s responsibility to silence those who hold different opinions than their own.²¹ These and many similar actions have triggered debates about shared responsibilities within the MSAs over the past years. How to exercise neutrality and responsibility on how ICTs are used and by whom makes tech-giants such as Google political players that de facto compete with elected policymakers.

Another example in that line of argumentation has been the arbitrary death of George Floyd in the US at the hands of a public police officer. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, his death triggered not only a global movement against racial discrimination but at the same time against unwilling or incapable governments. Like the worldwide protests of Islamists who attacked the editorial office of the satirical magazine Charly Hebdo in Paris 2015, civil society and protesters were demanding global solidarity with a ‘free world’ by exclaiming ‘Je suis Charlie.’ City mayors worldwide illuminated city icons to show solidarity, from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to the Statute of Christo Redentor in Rio de Janeiro, and marches of solidarity emerged within weeks, globally. ‘Freedom and tolerance’ protests took place in London, Brussels, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, Istanbul, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Ramallah, to name but a few. The same happened in 2021 after the death of George Floyd.

The 2021 Earth Hour, initiated by climate activist, became an event that broke all records of global solidarity. In over 190 countries, billions of households and hundreds of citizens dimmed their lights to save energy. 6.7 billion impressions, photos, art pieces, voices on media and YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter showed global support for sharing concerns over the sustainable energy security of our planet. Citizens beyond state institutions are apparent in their votes and protests and the ‘corporate state’ became the center of attention for a short while, in which software companies make the rules, not elected policymakers.

4.2.3 Private Enterprise and Business

In 2021, the World Bank published a comprehensive study on the informal and formal economy ratio in over 160 countries. It confirmed all predictions, namely that the informal sector had by far outnumbered the formal one by 60:40, and that the economy and business are no longer under full control of governments. At least 2 billion people of the world’s total population of approx. 8 billion, that is 1:4, is earning his or her living in the informal sector and micro-market (Ohnsorge, 2021). According to the ILO’s World Social Protection Report (2021), that makes 4 billion people and hence half of the world’s population lacking of any social protection. Many fall into poverty.

Any crisis, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the world grain-crisis in 2022, revealed and exacerbated the social protection gap between countries with high- and low-income levels. Unregulated and non-taxable Small Medium Enterprises (SME), street vendors, farmers, mechanics, and family businesses offer goods for daily needs and services to keep the country running. Many of them even own generators to produce energy for households, and apartment complexes run small private clinics and private education facilities PPP has gone out of hand in many countries, and business has taken over the public sector and the commons. If the state fails to regulate economy and currency, the consquence is that mafia, oligarchs, ‘freelancers,’ and ‘self-employment’ fuel the informal sector, operating below the taxation radar and not contributing to public services.

Approx. 550 billion dollars in remittances flow to low and small-income countries annually and boost the informal economy comprising up to 60% of the total income in these countries. In poor developing countries, up to 80% or 90% of the economy operates informally. The World Bank study also illustrates that with this dramatic rise of the informal sector, poverty rises, agricultural productivity shrinks, and public health and education suffer, and—not unnoticed—along with it, the gender gap grows, too.

Statistically, children in countries with a robust informal sector attend fewer years in school than in countries with a formal economy because they must work early to support their families.²² But what on average is left of the formal sector, that is approx. 40–20% of the economy, needs state regulations in the form of taxation of products and services and incentives to set up business. But in the hands of corrupt governments that is unlikely to happen. The 2021 Global Taxation Pact and supply chain regulations endorsed by the G7 and the EU aimed to respond to this global phenomenon, since individual states cannot solve this problem.

One of the earliest initiatives to regulate the glocalization process has been the UN Global Compact for Business and Human Rights in 2000 and the Public–Private Partnership (PPP) initiatives in the 1990s. They paved the way for the G20 Global Tax Deal in 2021, aiming to guide governments—or what is left of them—in regulating global trade and protecting worker and consumer rights domestically. A coalition of UNDP, the WTO, the OECD, IMF, Moody’s, and the World Bank has turned into a strange mix of global consumer protection leagues, demanding human rights compliance in business. This alliance has called for fair wages and safe working space and they have become key actors and stakeholders in the business arena. The economists Braithwaite and Drahos, for example, argue that effective and decent global regulation in collaboration with private business and CSOs are setting an influential agenda and pressuring decision-making bodies beyond state authorities to respond or withdraw (Braithwaite & Drahos, 2008).

However, suppose statehood is primarily about sovereignty and territorial control, including the value of the domestic currency—this is eroding, too. Today’s two lead world currencies, namely the Dollar and the Euro, have become glocal currency, demonstrating that state authorities cannot even preserve the last domain of statehood, that is the currency. How dramatic this evolution turns out, was seen in the Russian government’s attempt to save the Rubel from total collapse by banning households to withdraw dollars after international sanctions kicked in March 2022. Nevertheless, the withdrawal of foreign currency worth $9.8 billion US Dollars from private accounts in one month cause a major financial and economic crisis in Russia for the years to come. In many countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, the Dollar is the de facto currency even for local shop owners. Transnational companies, international trade, and OC and NSA operate on Dollars and Euros exclusively. Nevertheless, where the domestic currency is weak and inflation is high, a new virtual cryptocurrency is entering the markets, genuinely glocal. Bitcoins are mined by anyone who has the IT facilities to do so, undermining state financial markets. It has made business and trade stateless and non-territorial. This digital currency was first created by a pseudonymous developer, ‘Nakamoto,’ in 2009 during the first financial crisis in the new millennia to respond to the fragility and uncertainty of state institutions. His real identity remains unknown—some say—but regardless of this, the cryptocurrency has developed today into an online payment mechanism throughout the world. Unlike national currencies, it is operated by a decentralized group of people, not a state. Cryptocurrency uses peer-to-peer (person-to-person) technology to facilitate instant payments, and those who own the computing power and network, known as ‘miners,’ create or mine the value of the currency by rewards—beyond any state control.

The value of any country’s currency is trust, and if cryptocurrency operates without state backing with, for example, gold deposits, it makes any currency unreliable and a matter of risk rather than trust. Since 2018, Bitcoin grew and fell remarkably within a day, and thousands of people lost their savings, because of lack of trust. For now it remains a gambling currency unless it will be glocally organized and governed in the future. But there is little doubt it will, since some countries announce to officially launch cryptocurrencies. Other, such as Turkey, for example, a country with one of the highest inflation rates of up to 70% over the past decade, banned the use of Bitcoin after many citizens bought it to counteract the dramatic inflation of the Lira and to bypass state failure. Because crypto money is individually mined, the government could not successfully intervene and became obsolete in its crucial role as the guardian of currency and economy. If, in addition to these developments, as the economist Piketty claims, fiscal dumping and tax havens are the norms, not the exception, then any state has failed to deliver its last remaining piece of sovereignty, namely taxation to pay for public goods. State-driven tax havens compete for business by undercutting one another’s tax rates and by this erode themselves from within (Piketty & Goldhammer, 2020). He argues that to overcome century-old inequality caused by a business elite, we need to explore new forms of a participatory economy based on equality, social property and education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Shared economy, in Piketty’s view, and fair distribution, and access to resources through Open-Source tools are one way out of the downward spiral of privatizing income and hence the dignity of people. The private ICT giants already are the key provider of Open-Source tools and even made it into the most classified parts of state governments. In 2013, the CIA signed a ten-year deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud services, and many enterprises followed. AWS and Google Cloud and today Meta are used by millions of users and by this, they put their data in the hands of a few remotely working programmers across their world. It is estimated that 99% of companies today use public clouding but keeping those data assets secure is business critical.

One spin-off from the e-economy is the crowd network economy such as Uber taxi services or food delivery services, and the big logistical and delivery giants, Zalando and Amazon, often run and organized by automated technologies and AI. Worrisome, there are no labor unions to guide, or speak for workers, yet millions work in these economies. An Uber algorithm calculates the salary by controlling the network that the driver deserves, not what s/he achieved. There are no social benefits or security, and hence this platform economy is not only informal but also not sustainable (Haller et al., 2019). Enterprise economy and OC often merge in this sector, and it is not always clear who is the duty-bearer and rights holder, when holding CEO or workers accountable.

In her essay in ‘Ghost Worker,’ Mary L. Gray and S. Suri wrote that this billion-dollar platform economy had created a new global underclass of invisible Networkers and Micro-Workers, including those who earn their living as trolls and with fake identities and accounts (2019). They have become duty bearers and rights holders at the same time. When tech giants such as Meta and Amazon become influential political stakeholders, unilaterally decide about interpretations of human rights norms, regulate markets and manipulate individual users’ choices, they appear even as moral authorities (Anderson, 2019; Hofferberth, 2019).

The 2014 open-ended UN intergovernmental working group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises for human rights (IWGW) has tried to elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate the activities of cloud and platform business.²³ The IWGW is collaborating with a variety of ICT giants and CSOs at the same time trying to make sure that governments keep the last word on how human rights are incorporated into the business, and in particular try to develop a concept to promote ‘shared responsibility.’ The group defines modern business as an economic activity such as manufacturing, transportation, distribution, commercialization, marketing, and retailing goods and services by a natural or legal person—no matter where and how they conduct the business. Victims of uncontrolled business are clients that have suffered losses and harm through harmful acts, such as omissions combined with climate change. It asked to ‘bring the state back in’ by trying to increase the liability of the governments and states to prosecute and trial business owners or their property in their own countries, and through extraterritorial jurisdiction.²⁴ Whether states who are unable to keep up the rule of law in their own country can do it in other countries is doubtful, but at least there are efforts to do so.

Cyber justice is a mechanism addressing citizens and states alike to claim back the sovereignty over the uncontrolled cyberspace, for example, via IP addresses that every digital device and its user has. This form of digital identification code allows courts to trace back users and hold persons accountable if they violate cyber and other international customary laws and rules. The EU, for that matter, pushed for having ethical principles for Artificial Intelligence to deal with these developments and in 2019 published the first ‘Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI.’ In 2022 it launched the ‘Digital Service Act,’ which pushed Big-Tech companies to make their algorithm transparent and allow customers limited personalized ads and provide grounds for a more self-determining use of the Internet. These guidelines and acts recommend and sometimes force companies to respect customers’ laws, the rule of law in general and universal values of protecting one’s privacy.

AI has become a gatekeeper to new private and individualized e-commerce, and hence a tool to push glocalization because global and local/private actors have to collaborate to handle the side effects of it. Nevertheless, since AI is not (yet) globally regulated, mechanisms like a global Cyber Court and domestically issued E-justice are high in demand and frequently discussed at Internet Governance Fora (IGFs). Social network platforms like TikTok and Meta were among the first to respond to EU claims. Their users want their data automatically deleted after a set period, but the companies claim that they get personal data—as currency—in reverse for providing ‘free services’ and can sell it to third parties. TikTok data is kept on servers in China, and the company is governmentally owned. When and where this data is used is generally unknown. But already it is assumed that both users and states have lost control over it. Data protection and privacy laws give us the illusion of independent states in many ways and leave us largely unprotected as Net users.

Glocal governance needs, therefore, a neutral Internet space in which Tech giants and consumers alike can respect and enforce human rights. Over the past years, Twitter, WhatsApp, TikTok, and WeChat have responded to the pressure from their consumers, agreed to compromise in intergovernmental agreements such as ITU about the configuration of net-mobility.