Category:Global Governance

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Context from the P2P Foundation

This is the most popular game in politics: framing the situation such that "the elites" is always the other side that you are fighting.

What if you change that narrative, i.e. the binary between good and evil translated in pseudo-class politics, in a 'trialectical' understanding a la Bertrand de Jouvenel. (see On Power)

Then you see politics as a 'fractional struggle', in which elite fractions compete for new alliance with forces from the middle and the bottom .

Then the (internal to the 'West') culture war starts making sense as a factional struggle between elite factions that each mobilize different sections of the 'people'.

Historically though, though sometimes one 'faction' indeed wins out (say the 'Catholic' faction against the 'pagan' faction at the end of the Roman empire), most of the time, they exhaust each other in that struggle, and a new 'synthesis, originally from the margins', becomes the new consensus. Think of how the struggle between the Catholics and the Reformers, gave way to the Westphalian compromise.

Or how actually, the struggle between the 'Herodians' and the violent Jewish anti-Roman faction, gave way to the synthesis by St. Paul, eventually embraced by Constantine, and made operational as the post-imperial Roman-German compromise by Clovis ?

This is the wild bet of the P2P Foundation strategy, that the western culture war, and its insertion in the global struggle between the West and the Rest, will make room for the Cosmo-Local Synthesis.

Question: how to identify the bottom, middle and top layer of this potential 'regenerative jurisdictional alliance".

Where are the geopolitical thinkers even contemplating this scenario ?

We discuss an emerging post-Westphalian movement, emerging out of the 'nomadic' Web3 environment, in our specific category on the Network Nations movement.

In terms of geopolitical analysis, four schools can be identified which go potentially in that direction:

The summary is from Grok:

  • Pluriversal / Decolonial Geopolitics (Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Global IR school): multiple co-existing world orders and ontologies instead of one hegemonic “universal.” No single “West vs Rest” endgame — room for many worlds.
  • Polycentric / Commons-based IR (Elinor Ostrom-inspired at global scale, plus networked-governance theorists): regenerative alliances built bottom-up + middle + top, not top-down Leviathans.
  • Historical-sociological synthesis thinking (de Jouvenel’s power analysis extended to IR; post-Westphalian compromise models): new grand bargains emerge precisely when old factions wear each other out.
  • Glocal / Networked Multi-Alignment (Parag Khanna-style connectography or metamodern complexity thinkers): functional coalitions and trans-local resilience trump rigid blocs.

This is Grok-based summary of the P2P Foundation's relative positioning around Geopolitics:

Introductory Material

World History as a Thermodynamic Process and the coming of a Third Global World System]]. Peter Pogany.

Introduction by James Quilligan: Beyond State Capitalism: The Commons Economy in our Lifetimes. [4]


See also:

  1. A framework for Local To Global Public Finance
  2. Establishing Global Common Goods, a Global Resource Agency and a Commons Reserve Currency
  3. The Co-Governance and Co-Production of the Commons through Commons Trusts (i.e. Common Wealth Trusts) on the basis of Social Charters
  4. Replacing the scarcity-engineering of neoliberal markets by the abundance engineering of the commons, see the Abundance - Typology and the Wealth Typology
  5. The context for policy change: Four Future Scenarios for the Global System, from: GLOBAL MEGACRISIS. A Survey of Four Scenarios on a Pessimism-Optimism Axis. By William Halal and Michael Marien.
  6. Mark Whitaker's book, Toward a Bioregional State, proposes a global Bioregional Democracy based on Civic Democratic Institutions and a Commodity Ecology

Sacha Pignot on the Three Levels of the Cosmo-Local Fractal Sovereignty Stack

Sacha Pignot identifies three levels of Fractal Sovereignty:


Hyper-Localism (micro level)

"The Connected Foundation:


Hyper-localism in fractal sovereignty isn’t isolation—it’s creating resilient foundation layers that can participate meaningfully in larger networks.


This includes:

- Household production: Food preservation, craft production, repair culture, energy generation

- Community workshops: Shared tools, skill exchanges, local fabrication capabilities

- Neighborhood resource sharing: Tool libraries, community kitchens, local currency systems

- Immediate ecosystem management: Watershed stewardship, local food systems, micro-grids


The key innovation: these systems maintain full autonomy over production processes and resource allocation while accessing global knowledge networks when beneficial. A community workshop using locally sourced wood can access global design innovations while maintaining control over working conditions.


Bioregionalism (meso level)

The Ecological Integration level:

"Bioregionalism organizes human activity along ecological boundaries rather than political ones. Watersheds, climate zones, ecosystems, and natural resource patterns define the scale of coordination, creating economic systems that work with ecological processes rather than against them.

In fractal sovereignty, bioregions function as meso-scale networks connecting multiple hyper-local communities while respecting ecological carrying capacity. Different communities might specialize—agriculture, manufacturing, knowledge work—while sharing resources and coordinating to maintain ecological balance.

Bioregional coordination operates through network dynamics rather than hierarchical control. Communities share information about resource availability, ecological conditions, production capacity, and needs through distributed networks while maintaining local autonomy."


Cosmo-Localism (macro level)

The Global Knowledge, Local Control level:

Unlike linear globalism creating disconnected extremities, cosmo-localism follows an ouroboros pattern—a cycle where global knowledge flows back to enhance local capacity, which in turn contributes to global knowledge.

This creates a regenerative loop rather than extractive pipeline: local innovations get documented and shared globally, global knowledge gets adapted to local conditions, and the cycle continues with each iteration building capacity at all scales."

(https://soushi888.substack.com/p/beyond-local-vs-global)


Typology

Proposed by Benjamin Life:


"Four Visions of Sovereignty After the State :

The post-Westphalian landscape is being contested by at least four distinct visions of what comes next. What unites them is the recognition that territorial sovereignty is no longer the only game in town. What divides them is the question of what replaces it, or, more precisely, where sovereignty migrates once it leaves the state.


Sovereignty migrates to capital

= corporate global governance.

The corporate sector has, in effect, already built a post-Westphalian order through capital markets, global supply chains, and regulatory capture. From this perspective, the nation-state is a legacy institution that introduces friction into the free flow of capital. The push toward free trade agreements, international regulatory harmonization, and corporate-friendly governance structures represents this vision. It doesn’t need to be conspiratorial; it operates through the perfectly rational pursuit of profit maximization across jurisdictions. If the Westphalian state drew its sovereignty from control of territory, the corporate order draws its sovereignty from control of capital flows. And in a world where capital moves at the speed of bits and states move at the speed of legislation, capital has already won this particular race.


Sovereignty migrates to technology

= the Network State.

Associated most closely with Balaji Srinivasan, the network state proposes building new states in digital space, organized around shared values rather than shared territory, and using cryptocurrency rather than democratic deliberation as the primary coordination mechanism. Sovereignty here is derived from the ability to exit: if you don’t like the rules, you fork the code and build your own jurisdiction. This is the libertarian fantasy of competitive governance, enabled by digital infrastructure. It breaks the Westphalian link between sovereignty and territory, but replaces it with a link between sovereignty and capital since the ability to exit, to start a new network state, to fork the protocol, requires resources that are not equally distributed. It is post-Westphalian in form but still operates within the zero-sum logic that Westphalian sovereignty was built on.


Sovereignty migrates to ecology

= Bioregional Governance.

Here, sovereignty is reorganized around watersheds and ecosystems rather than arbitrary political boundaries. Drawing on both indigenous wisdom traditions and ecological science, bioregional governance proposes that communities should govern themselves as commons within the limits of living systems, coordinating across bioregions for larger challenges. Sovereignty in this model is fundamentally relational: you are sovereign not through your ability to project force across a border but through the quality of your relationships with land, water, and neighbor. The bioregion cannot be owned; any attempt to claim authority over it reproduces colonial logic. Instead, governance follows natural systems: watersheds, migration patterns, forest ecologies, rather than imposing artificial boundaries on them. This is genuinely post-Westphalian because it relocates the source of political legitimacy from human institutions to living systems. The ecology is sovereign; human governance is in service to it.


Sovereignty migrates to relationships

= Network Nations.

This model proposes that sovereignty can be constituted through the quality of relationships between people and communities, networked together through shared infrastructure, voluntary or values-based solidarity, and mutual aid. Power is subsidiarity itself: it resides at the most local level possible and is only delegated upward when coordination across scales is genuinely necessary. Network nations are not states. They don’t claim territorial jurisdiction or monopolies on violence. They are webs of consent, deriving legitimacy not from control but from demonstrated care, transparent governance, and the practical capacity to improve the lives of their participants. This is the most radical departure from Westphalian logic, because it locates sovereignty neither in territory, nor in capital, nor in ecology alone, but in the living relationships between beings who choose to coordinate their lives together.

These four visions are not equally weighted. Corporate global governance has the resources and institutional momentum. The network state has Silicon Valley capital and techno-libertarian ideology. Network nations and bioregional movements have the least power and the most promise, because they are the only vision that takes seriously both the need for global coordination and the primacy of local relationship, and because they do not require seizing or building a state in order to function. They can begin now, with the people and places and networks already present."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/a-farewell-to-empire)


Quotes

Short Quotes

We need a scalable, networked form of social cohesion

"Crude forms of identity are emerging to provide social cohesion as national identity melts away. We need a scalable, networked form of social cohesion to replace those crude forms. That requires finding and reinforcing networks of consensus."

- John Robb (fb, 2020)


G. Kallis on 'When Autonomy becomes Heteronomy'

“Self-limitation requires institutions at higher levels to secure the endurance of agreed limits.” : “The setting of limits is then partly a problem of global, collective action: can we set up the higher-level international institutions that can control, say, carbon emissions or aggression or competition, and let nations and lower-level polities set up their own limits?”

(https://docs.google.com/document/d/19EfFqpI6H-wDH379qG0tFkMpgTKphV5tVCUcYycyT3M/edit)


Long Quotes

Time is limited: Once global connectivity fails, civilization loses the only mechanism through which a new form of coordination could emerge

1. "What we are witnessing is not a civilizational crisis but the loss of applicability of hierarchical coordination."

"The dominant challenges of our time are planetary. Climate destabilization, existential technological risk, systemic fragility, and global interdependence cannot be addressed within fragmented, competing units.

Yet the prevailing form of social coordination divides humanity into self-referential structures — states, blocs, corporations — each pursuing local optimization.

This form may have operated on a smaller scale. At a global scale, it becomes internally contradictory. It produces fragmentation where coherence is required.

Competition where coordination is essential. Short-term advantage where long-term survival is at stake.

What collapses is not stability within the system, but the system's applicability itself.

Not a crisis, but a loss of applicability!

A crisis can be resolved from within the logic that produced it. What we are facing cannot.

This is not a failure of leadership. Not a deficit of technology or intelligence. Not a moral collapse of humanity.

It is the exhaustion of a form that is no longer capable of operating under contemporary conditions. In this sense, what we are witnessing is not a civilizational crisis but the loss of applicability of hierarchical coordination."


2. "What form of social coordination is capable of existing under conditions of global interdependence?"

A direct consequence of a collapsing form is the erosion of global communication — the only remaining substrate of modern civilization.

The present world remains functional not because its institutions are stable, but because connectivity still holds: the ability of any person, in any location, to reach any other through a global digital medium.

If hierarchical fragmentation deepens to the point where communication networks become unreliable, contested, or structurally broken, the possibility of coordinated action disappears entirely.

Without a coherent communication layer, no solution — technical, social, or economic — can be implemented. The collapse becomes irreversible.

This is why time is limited.

The loss of applicability is not an abstract diagnosis; it points to a concrete threshold.

Once global connectivity fails, civilization loses the only mechanism through which a new form of coordination could emerge."

- Andrei Lubalin [5]

< no civilization is whole anymore >

"If the mesh describes the architecture of this planetary moment, and the clocks describe its tempo, then the civilisations inside it tell a quieter truth: none of them are whole anymore. Every civilisation that once imagined itself a complete body—self-governing, self-understood, self-sufficient—now finds that only fragments of that old coherence remain. Some still have mass; others carry memory. Some move quickly; others endure. But none possess all the traits required to move through this world intact. Completeness has vanished.

In the older world, this didn’t matter. Civilisations rose and fell inside geographies elastic enough to absorb shocks. There was space around them, and time to recalibrate. Their failures did not immediately become someone else’s problem; their internal misalignments did not instantly ripple across continents. Even decline took its time.

But in the planetary mesh, everything presses against everything else. Energy grids, supply chains, compute clusters, migration patterns, climate belts—each is now inseparable from the next. A civilisation’s strength no longer protects it; its weakness no longer stays contained. The world behaves like a single system with too many centres and no perimeter, and the result is an uncomfortable geometry: many bodies, none complete, all colliding inside an environment that cannot support more than two fully realised civilisational forms at any one time.

One of these bodies is China, perhaps the last civilisation that still tries to act as a coherent organism. It has bureaucratic memory, infrastructural throughput, industrial depth, territorial scale, and a political metabolism that can still coordinate across distance. Coherence is its signature. And coherence is also its limit. A body that integrated can move as one, but it can also strain as one. Over-coherence becomes brittleness: the inability to absorb shock without reverberating the stress through every organ at once.

Opposite it stands the United States, the only true stack-state—a body distributed across code, capital, culture, research clusters, entertainment, diasporas, defence networks, and global financial plumbing. It holds no single centre, but it possesses a remarkable capacity to mutate under pressure, reframing narratives and opening new frontiers in moments of crisis. America is powerful in motion and volatile at rest. It improvises its way through history, and in the mesh this becomes both strength and constraint. It can act quickly, but it cannot maintain a stable rhythm.

The third position—the “half body”—never settles. Sometimes it is the Gulf, with its concentrated energy metabolism, capital surpluses, sovereign computing ambitions, and corridor diplomacy. Its strength is speed; its vulnerability is depth. Sometimes the third position is India: enormous demographic mass, cultural multiplicity, global diasporic reach, a services metabolism, and a restless industrial ambition. But India struggles to turn its scale into synchrony; its internal rhythms rarely lock into place. Both can tilt the system. Neither can anchor it.

Everyone else sits in the periphery of this geometry."

- Chor Pharn [6]


No civilization today can survive without the planetary mesh

"The mesh has no ideology. It is not liberal or authoritarian; it simply optimises flows. To participate in it, a civilisation doesn’t need a worldview—it needs throughput. Redundancy. Predictability. A willingness to be part of a system that will quietly punish friction wherever it appears. Civilisations used to be built on soil, myth, and memory. The mesh moves like water. It slips across borders, laughs at doctrine, and routes itself around any centre that gets too rigid, too proud, or too slow.

This is what makes it the first post-civilisational architecture. The markers we once relied on—coherence, scale, speed, memory—no longer map cleanly to sovereignty. A civilisation can be vast and still weak. It can be coherent and still brittle. It can move quickly and still be trapped. The mesh doesn’t care about any of this. It only cares that flows continue.


And here is the uncomfortable truth: 

no civilisation today can supply the full operating system.

None can withdraw from it either.

They are caught inside a world that no longer needs their stories to function.

This is the planetary condition.

This is the backdrop against which everything else ... unfolds."

- Chor Pharn [7]


The Self in Civilizational Evolution

"One way to understand the civilizational challenge we face is therefore as a problem of expanding the theory of the self required to operate within these larger fields.

The first step is moving beyond the momentary individual self, the decision-maker defined primarily within the present economic cycle.

Beyond that lies the generational self, which recognizes that individuals participate in the continuity of their own lineage and social inheritance. This perspective extends the horizon of decision-making beyond immediate incentives toward the persistence of families, cultures, and institutions across time.

A further expansion introduces the intergenerational self, which situates human activity within longer historical arcs. In this frame, societies become custodians of systems that must remain viable across multiple generations rather than merely within a single economic period.

Finally, there is the entangled self, which recognizes that human beings are non-divisibly embedded within spatial and ecological systems. The boundaries between actors, environments, and infrastructures become less discrete. Economic and political actions are understood as operating within fields of entanglement rather than isolated exchanges.

These expansions do not eliminate the individual. They situate the individual within wider temporal and relational structures.

Seen in this way, the challenge of operating beyond Dunbar’s number is not simply a coordination problem. It is a conceptual one. Civilization has already expanded the reach of human action to planetary scale. The question is whether our understanding of the self can expand to operate within the same field of consequence."

-Indy Johar [8]


The advent of hyper-empowered networks in a quadriformist age

1.

"Societies have relied across the ages on four cardinal forms of organization: kinship-oriented tribes, hierarchical institutions, competitive markets, and collaborative networks. These forms have co-existed since people first began to assemble into societies — there was always someone doing some activity using one or more of those basic forms. But each has emerged and taken hold as a major form of organization, governance, and evolution in a different historical era. Tribes were first millennia ago (with civil society becoming its modern manifestation); institutions developed millennia later (e.g., states, armies); then centuries later came market systems for growing our economies — hence modern societies with their three major realms.

“If that were the end of the story, our prospects for evolving still more complex societies would be nearing an evolutionary cul-de-sac (“the end of history”). Notice, however, that the network form is only now coming into its own, starting a few decades ago. Network forms have been around, in use, for millennia. But they have lacked the right kind of information and communications technology to enable them to take hold and spread. Each preceding form emerged, in turn, because an enabling information technology revolution occurred at the time — i.e., speech and storytelling for tribes, writing and printing for institutions, telegraphy and telephony for markets. The ongoing digital information technology revolution is finally energizing the network form, enabling it to compete with the other forms and address problems they aren’t good at resolving."

- David Ronfeldt [9]


2.

David Ronfeldt:

"“We currently live in an advanced modern society that has a triform design — meaning it has three major realms: civil society, government, and an economy, variously arranged and each relying on its own form organization. This triform design emerged several centuries ago. It still holds sway today.

“Indeed, nearly all of today’s ideological isms — capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, progressivism, and populism, as well as trendier anarcho-capitalism, neo-libertarianism, neo-monarchism, accelerationism, national conservatism, techno-humanism, techno-colonialism, cosmo-localism, etc. — are triform in nature. They address how civil-society, government, and/or the economy should be shaped, and how their actors are supposed to think and behave. All of today’s politicians are, at best, triformists.

“But triform societies are now nearing their end. Because of growing social complexities and complications, they have nearly exhausted their capabilities as designs that can address and resolve all they need to.

“Quadriformism is where future evolution is headed — a distinct fourth realm will emerge and take shape in the decades ahead, absorbing particular kinds of actors and activities that the current three realms are no longer able to handle well. There are reasons to project that this next new realm will consist largely of health, education, welfare, and environmental actors and activities — matters that are about care, broadly defined, rather than identity, power, or profit. These care-centric actors and activities will move (and be moved) into this new realm, which will be as distinct and independent in design as the current three realms are from each other.

“This evolution from triform to quadriform designs will radically redefine the nature of societies as a whole, and improve the performance capabilities of all four realms. New philosophies and ideologies will arise.”

(https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/p/looking-for-a-better-ideology-quadriformism-34f)


The Post-Westphalian Planetary Order of Planetary Cooperation

Cosmo-Local Bioregionalism facilited by Partner States:

"Nearly five hundred years ago, the Treaty of Westphalia applied the ancient system of core and periphery to a governance structure, which later evolved into sovereign international law. But managing the real wealth of resources according to their energy potential has never been possible in a core-periphery regime. Today, the planet’s steady rise in temperatures, extreme weather, and declines in net energy require a system of logistic growth to maintain the sustainable yield of its habitats, for which few leaders are now prepared (Brown 2003, 131--50). If, as in the past, a core like China/Russia or America/Europe were to establish control of the world’s net energy by exploiting their periphery endowed with cheap and plentiful sources of energy, the newly arrived hegemon will immediately encounter the challenges of declining resources, food and water rationing, roaming populations, and overwhelming dissent. The system of core-periphery is decaying, and any attempt to recreate the historical mismatch between hegemon and energy will bring on diminishing returns and autocratic shambles. The next core power would destroy its own capacities in taking on the role of planetary administrator for a new ecological, cultural, social, political, and economic order under daunting emergency conditions."

- James Quilligan [10]


Metajurisdicitons for the Functional Sovereignty of Network Nations

"We have been witnessing a structural unbundling of sovereignty. While the Westphalian model presupposes a one-to-one correspondence between territory, population, and governance, this correspondance is eroding under the pressure of the “network society.” As Castells notes, power has become increasingly fluid, dynamic, networked and distributed; but our legal systems remain locked in a territorial conception of sovereignty that evolves at the pace of precedent— not innovation. ... Meta jurisdictions are not a replacement for territorial legal systems but an extension of them: a way to compose existing legal features into new configurations that address problems those systems weren’t designed for. The features already available across jurisdictions is rich. Trusts, foundations, arbitration, choice of law, recognition regimes, corporate forms—these are mature tools, developed over centuries, battle-tested in courts and markets. What’s new is the extent to which our activities are digitally encoded— sufficiently so that there is now a possibility of combining these features to deliberately create virtualized legal spaces that serve novel purposes: AI governance, climate accountability, digital identity, new economic logics.

- Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera De Filippi [11]


Peter Pogany on the Transition towards a Third Thermo-Dynamically Stable World System

"His theory predicts that global society is drifting toward a new form of self-organization that will recognize limits to demographic-economic expansion – but only after we go through a new chaotic transition that will start sometime between now and the 2030s:

"History has recorded two distinct global systems thus far: “laissez faire/metal money,” which spanned most of the 19th century and lasted until the outbreak of World War I, and “mixed economy/weak multilateralism,” which began after 1945 and exists today. The period between the two systems, 1914-1945, was a chaotic transition. This evolutionary pulsation is well known to students of thermodynamics. It corresponds to the behavior of expanding and complexifying material systems.

The exhaustion of oil and other natural resources is pushing the world toward a third global system that may be called “two-level economy/strong multilateralism.” It will be impossible to get there without a new chaotic transition. No repeated warnings, academic advice, moral advocacy, inspired reforms, or political leadership can provide a shortcut around it. But if it took “1914-1945″ to make a relatively minor adjustment in the global order, what will it take to make a major one?”

- Peter Pogany [12] (via Dave McLeod)


DAO's as Seeds of Distributed Social Governance in a Viscous Society

"Seeing the global society in terms of strict dichotomy of “disorder versus structure/control” is counter-productive for understanding and governing it. Both ends of this dichotomy are undesirable: disorder is simply not a viable solution for society, while stable structures are not sustainable and even harmful due to the increasing social complexity. We therefore propose to approach society in terms of a fine balance of ever adapting temporary structures in otherwise fluid whole — a 'viscous' system." ... "What we propose with the image of A World of Views and the Living Cognitive Society is the shift of emphasis from the structures and institutions to the very process of creation, adaptation and dissolution of social subsystems at all scales of the global society. Furthermore, the naturally distributed nature of the process – meaning the absence of central body or ‘trusted party’ governing it – should be embraced, rather than fought with establishing global institutions or ‘world governments’ as, we maintain, no stable structure would be able to outweigh the factors of social complexity driving the society towards increasing fluidity."

- Viktoras Veitas and David Weinbaum [13]


Nick Dyer-Witheford on Three Global Solution Tribes

"The conjuncture requires an analysis that comprehends not just at the World Trade Organization and the Zapatistas, but also Al Quaeda (not to mention all the Christian, Hindu, Judaic theocratic fundamentalisms).

Sketching in the ashes of a global war scenario, I propose a triangulation between three points:

a) The logic of neoliberal capitalism. I call this the logic of the World Market. It interpellates a planet of market subjects: consumers.

b) The logic of exclusionary ethno-nationalist-religious movements. I call this the logic of Fundamentalist Reaction. It addresses a planet lethally divided amongst chosen peoples.

c) The logic of collective creativity and welfare proposed by the counter-globalization movements. I call this the logic of Species Beings. It speaks to a planet of commoners. A whole series of molecular energies are currently being attracted, apportioned and annihilated between these three molar aggregates."

- Nick Dyer-Witheford [14]


Jose Ramos on Cosmo-Localism

"Cosmo-Localization describes the dynamic potentials of the globally distributed knowledge commons in conjunction with emerging capacity for localized production of value. The imperative to create economically and ecologically resilient communities is driving initiatives for ‘re-localization’. Yet, such efforts for re-localization need to be put in the context of new technologies, national policy, transnational knowledge regimes and the wider global knowledge commons."

- Jose Ramos [15]


A.J. Toynbee on the role of Small Scale within Big Scale

“The present day global set of sovereign states is not capable of keeping peace, and it is not capable of saving the biosphere’s non-replaceable natural resources. What has been needed for the last 5,000 years, has become technologically feasible in the last 100, but not yet politically, is a global body politic composed of cells on the scale of the Neolithic-Age village community - a scale on which participants could be personally acquainted with each other, while each of them would also be a citizen of the world state.”

- A.J. Toynbee [16]


Brian Holmes on how market and state failure can lead to a commons resurgence at the global scale

"Minqi Li's claim is that too many formerly peripheral countries -- especially the giants, India and China -- have moved into the position of what the world systems theorists call "semi-peripheral" countries, supplying mid-range or partially elaborated products to the central, high-technology producers. The result is a declining pool of people to exploit, both in terms of labor and resources, and in terms of defenseless markets that must necessarily buy products from the center. When large percentages of the world population have access to at least mid-level producer technology, capital can no longer accumulate at the former centers, whose power declines. The current state of affairs in Western Europe and the US/Canada seems to bear this thesis out.

In such a perspective, the p2p ideas and those of everyone working on p2p and commons approaches become far more pertinent. When the centers of capital accumulation can off the fruits of very high technology to all of those, across the world, who rise into the middle classes, then there is scant likelihood of winning them over to a cooperative approach -- the powers of capitalist seduction are just too strong. Yet in a condition of long-term stagnation, coupled with environmental threats stemming directly and visibly from capital accumulation, alternative proposals may become much more attractive across a flattening global hierarchy."

- Brian Holmes, August 2014


Engage Global, Test Local, Spread Viral

John Boik:

"No matter how promising the design of a new system might be, it would be unreasonable to expect that a nation would abruptly drop an existing system in favor of a new one. Nevertheless, a viable, even attractive strategy exists by which new systems could be successfully researched, developed, tested, and implemented. I call it engage global, test local, spread viral.

Engage global means to engage the global academic community and technical sector, in partnership with other segments of society, in a well-defined R&D program aimed at computer simulation and scientific field testing of new systems and benchmarking of results. In this way, the most profound insights of science can be brought into play.

Test local means to scientifically test new designs at the local (e.g., city or community) level, using volunteers (individuals, businesses, non-profits, etc.) organized as civic clubs. This approach allows testing by relatively small teams, at relatively low cost and risk, in coexistence with existing systems, and without legislative action.

Spread viral means that if a system shows clear benefits in one location (elimination of poverty, for example, more meaningful jobs, or less crime) it would likely spread horizontally, even virally, to other local areas. This approach would create a global network of communities and cities that cooperate in trade, education, the setup of new systems, and other matters. Over time, its impact on all segments of society would grow.

Cities, big and small, are the legs upon which all national systems rest. Already cities and their communities are hubs for innovation. With some further encouragement and support, and the right tools and programs, they could become more resilient and robust, and bigger heroes in the coming great transition." (https://medium.com/@JohnBoik/an-economy-of-meaning-or-bust-2aa46457b649#.1i09j8lv3)


Carl Schmitt on how a world state based on reciprocity would overcome perpetual war

"Were a world state to embrace the entire globe and humanity, then it would be no political entity and could only loosely be called a state. If, in fact, all humanity and the entire world were to become a unified entity . . . [and should] that interest group also want to become cultural, ideological, or otherwise more ambitious, and yet remain strictly nonpolitical, then it would be a neutral consumer or producer co- operative moving between the poles of ethics and economics. It would know neither state nor kingdom nor empire, neither republic nor monarchy, neither aristocracy nor democracy, neither protection nor obedience, and would altogether lose its political character."

- Carl Schmitt, cited by Kojin Karatani, Structure of World History, p. 305


John Bunzl on the Need for Simultaneous Policy To Overcome the Limitations of the Nation-State

The simple fact, then, is there can be no change to the existing OS (= operating system) without a transformation of the nation-state system. It must somehow be transformed from its present mode of destructive competition to a new mode of fruitful cooperation. In our globalized and highly interconnected world, there simply is no other alternative if we want things to change for the better. Yes, there may be minor changes and improvements that could be possible lower down the system at local, national or regional levels. But without a change of the OS at the global level, lower-level changes will always be hampered, undermined and ultimately prove futile. The pathology at the top of the system will always trickle its poison to the lower levels. Indeed, to think we could make our global economy just and sustainable without cooperative governance on the same global scale is just wishful thinking. Fortunately, the Simultaneous Policy (Simpol) campaign www.simpol.org offers a practical answer to the question of how to effect this transformation." (https://medium.com/@johnbunzl_93216/we-need-a-new-operating-system-the-gauntlet-has-been-laid-down-49689addc894)


Arran Gare on the Need for Strong Democracy

“The current form of the globalized economy has disempowered local communities and is characterized by massive concentrated power in a global ruling class of managers based in transnational corporations. These power relations are inimical to achieving sustainable development. What are now required are institutions that can re-embed markets in communities, making markets serve the ends of these communities rather than enslaving communities to the logic of disembedded markets, manipulated to serve the interests of these global power elites. A global economy is unavoidable, but it needs to be radically transformed and economic life re-localized as much as Possible.”

(https://www.academia.edu/43252621/Toward_an_Ecological_Civilization_-_An_Interview_with_Arran_Gare?)



Robert Conan Ryan on the Fifth Magisterium of the Commons

"Neither science nor technology can provide the answers to the correct human limits and environmental limits One of my conclusions, in my historical analysis, is that we need a fifth Magisterium: the environmental magisterium, a set of institutions with special powers to balance the others.

We therefore need international organizations that can actually block environmental exploitation and manage resources with more independence from the other magistetia powers.

The other conclusion: strengthening the powers of the cultural commons to develop better ways of living for their own sake , rather than for the sake of business .

By strengthening the cultural commons and adding a true environmental Magisteria to our world system, we could solve many institutional problems that otherwise seem unsolvable."

- Robert Conan Ryan [17]


On the Necessity of Intermediary Scales for the Legitimacy of the Planetary

"If you just say we need a “global management authority” and don’t think about the intermediate scales by which people have relations to it, that’s a problem.

I want to keep making my Montesquieuian and Tocquevillian argument for the intermediate scale: Even the planetary scale depends in some part on legitimacy, participation, acceptance and recognition of problems that come from these intermediate scales. Now, that doesn’t mean that everybody participates in making every decision; you could have a technocratic planetary management linked to a more or less democratic governance structure, with some mechanism of democratic participation. But when you centralize, be sure that you have also created mechanisms for decentralized discourse in relation to the center."

- Craig Calhoun [18]


Jeffery Ladish, on why, absent global coordination, future technology will cause human extinction

"Absent strong coordination mechanisms, future technological development suffers from the unilateralist's curse. Real global coordination is necessary to systematically disincentivize the creation of dangerous tech. And even then, disincentivizing the creation of dangerous tech is insufficient, because it may not be easy to tell in advance which technologies will prove dangerous. Even if every country in the world agreed to share intelligence about technological threats and enforce international laws about their use, there is no guarantee a black marble would not be pulled out by accident. A global framework must also incentivize rigorous risk analysis, the right kinds of caution, and quick responses to potentially dangerous developments. Presently, several organizations are undergoing difficult research into the potential pitfalls of artificial general intelligence. There is little agreement about the right approach to safe development. Other risks, like those posed from synthetic biology, have no dedicated research organizations and only receive a small amount of attention in the literature today. To overcome these problems, there must be a powerful international mandate to systematically study these risks and create thorough and practical risk reduction frameworks that can be applied in every part of the world."

- Jeffery Ladish [19]


On the need for a positive 'noospheric' discourse

"Existing discourses about globalization are not very encouraging for the future of humanity.

  • The Anthropocene focuses on the negative global impact of humans (Steffen et al., 2007).
  • The Globalization discourse is focused on socio-political and economical issues and has troubles caring about and integrating growing geosphere and biosphere challenges (e.g., Odum, 2001).
  • The Gaia hypothesis (e.g., Lovelock, 1979) takes an organic view of planet Earth but neglects or sees in a negative light human activities and technologies.
  • The techno-singularity discourse (e.g., Kurzweil, 2005) is more positive by focusing on the promises of artificial intelligence and machines, but it has been criticized as a techno-utopia (e.g., Cole-Turner, 2012; Hughes, 2012) and has not much to say about pressing real-world issues affecting the geosphere or the biosphere.

By contrast, a growing Noosphere discourse proposes a meaningful narrative and vision for the future, where the geosphere, the biosphere and the noosphere—including humans and machines—could work in concert to unleash a new level in evolution."

- Clement Vidal [20]


The Cosmopolis as a Protocol

1. 

"Nation-states organize affective memories into a vibe-based territorial logic, 

metropolises organize declarative memories into capability based physical network supernodes that are dense population centers 

cosmopolises organize procedural memories into widely diffused infrastructures."


2.

"More than one distinctive cosmopolis may emerge in response to a technological stimulus, and the set of cosmopolises may not be either mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustive in relation to either the planet or the political world. A cosmopolis is not a planetarity. It is a smaller unit of analysis, and a legibly embodied geographic reality in a way a planetarity is not. We can sketch out cosmopolises on maps. ... new technologies induce new normals through protocolization of what is initially a weird and scary sort of monstrousness irrupting across a frontier. Beyond that frontier lies a new kind of territory, a new kind of “soil” on which societies can be built. Protocols are the engines of what I called manufactured normalcy a decade ago, and cosmopolises correspond loosely to what I called Manufactured Normalcy Fields.

- Venkatesh Rao [21]

Topics

Global Commons and Participatory International Systems

  1. Global Commons and Common Sense. Jorge Buzaglo. real-world economics review, issue no. 51 [22] : policy proposals for a global governance of planetary commons
  2. Four Principles and Corollaries of Network Society and the New International Governance. By by Alexander Schellong, Philipp Mueller. [23]
  3. Hilary Cottam on Participatory Global Governance Systems: Winter 2010 (Vol.XXXI. No 4) edition of the Harvard International Review. [24]
  4. Philipp Mueller on Planetary Public Policy‎ and Open Statecraft
  5. Steve Waddell on Global Action Networks
  6. Developing the Meta Services for the Eco-Social Economy: on developing a framework for an eco-social economy - includings its arrangements to manage natural commons. Text proposed by Feasta, Ireland. By Brian Davey with the assistance of John Jopling.
  7. In his book, Occupy World Street, Ross Jackson proposes the creation of a Gaian League.
  8. The Political Economy of Sharing. By Adam Parsons.
  9. Benjamin Studebaker on Global Political Federalism [25]

Institutional Proposals for Global Governance


On the Influence of Technology on Global Politics

Via [26]

  • ‘algorithmic regulation’,
  • ‘government as a platform’ (Tim O’Reilly),
  • ‘direct technocracy’ viz. ‘info-states’ (Parag Khanna),
  • ‘smart states’ (Beth Noveck), or
  • ‘social physics’ (Alex Pentland)

People and Visions

Poor Richard: Framing the discussion in the contect of P2P-driven global governance

Poor Richard:

"Can a hollowed-out, privatized government to effectively cope with the increasing complexity of social and environmental crises such as global warming.

I agree that the failure of government regulation to curb the destructive activity of large corporations is only likely to worsen with the increasing privatization of government and the increasing complexity of global problems. So what can p2p culture do about this?

1. Establish powerful, confederated P2P Guilds and Leagues based on various global commons of knowledge and expertise so that mitigations, adaptations, and other interventions can be crowd-sourced by massively distributed, parallel, and open networks of peers.

2. Establish many strong, self-reliant economies at the local geopolitical (or Eco-political) level by forming partnerships between the P2P guilds and progressive local communities. These partnerships would maximize economies of scope via peer production and would also be strongly confederated with their peers bio-regionally, nationally, and globally.

3. One more maneuver that may be necessary to assist this process I will dub “castling”, a term borrowed from the game of chess. What I mean by this is a shifting of local populations between adjacent local geopolitical jurisdictions (such as cities and counties in the US) so as to create political, social, and economic majorities of p2p culture in the targeted locations.

The resulting strongly confederated p2p cultural strongholds might stand the best chance of competing with the large corporate entities, excluding them from the “castled” commons, and limiting the scope of their environmental destruction." (http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/guilding-the-lilly/)

Alex Evans

  1. Shooting the Rapids: "argues that the key challenge is to join up the dots between the institutions, processes and actors that we have now. Part of this task involves expanding the scope of multilateralism to engage much more intensively with non-state actors"
  2. Multilateralism for an Age of Scarcity: paper uses the shared operating system / shared awareness / shared platforms framework (follow-up of Shooting the Rapids)

James Greyson

See: Seven Policy Switches for strategic change on a planetary level

James Quilligan

  1. Toward a Commons-based Framework for Global Negotiations
  2. People Sharing Resources. Toward a New Multilateralism of the Global Commons. James Bernard Quilligan Kosmos Journal, Fall | Winter 2009: this article frames what a global commons-based policy and governance structure should be.

PM

  1. Six Modules for the Institutions of the Global Commons‎‎
  2. Three Institutional Spheres of Commoning‎

Towards Open Civil Societies

  • Nora McKeon: Civil Society and the United Nations: Legitimating Global Governance-Whose Voice. (Zed 2009).


Key Resources



Key Articles


James Quilligan

On the overall framework of a Commons and Civil Society oriented global policy and governance framework that insures sustainability:

  • James Bernard Quilligan. People Sharing Resources. Toward a New Multilateralism of the Global Commons. Published in Kosmos Journal, Fall | Winter 2009

Others

Key Books

  • George Monbiot "has written 'The Age of Consent' which calls for a new political movement to democratize existing global institutions." [30]
  • The philosopher Peter Singer has written 'One World' which examines the ethics of globalization. [31]
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued that we are creating a new order of supranational organization in 'Empire'. [32]
  • The Commons and a New Global Governance. Edited by Samuel Cogolati and Jan Wouters. Leuven Global Governance series, Elgar, 2018 [33]: "explores the democratic, institutional, and legal implications of the commons for global governance today."


John Bunzl

Books by John Bunzl, the founder of Simpol, the International Simultaneous Policy Organization.

Amazon


Others


Key Concepts

Reproduced from Nafeez Ahmed: [35]

Planetary Phase Shift: A systemic civilizational transformation involving the collapse of the fossil-fueled industrial paradigm and the potential emergence of a regenerative, distributed, and post-extractive operating system. The latter is not guaranteed.

Control Room: The domain of worldviews, governance models, economic logics, and cultural values that shape collective decision-making and institutional behavior.

Engine Room: The material infrastructure of civilization—energy systems, food production, mobility networks, information flows, and materials—which reflect and reproduce the operating logic of the control room.

Polycrisis: The convergence and entanglement of multiple interrelated crises—climate, economic, geopolitical, cultural—into a self-reinforcing system of instability.

Tipping Point: A threshold at which a small additional stressor causes a system to shift irreversibly to a new state.

Feedback Loop: A process where a change in one part of a system either amplifies (positive feedback) or dampens (negative feedback) changes elsewhere in the system.

Degenerative System: An extractive, polluting, and inequitable system that undermines ecological integrity and human well-being over time.

Regenerative System: A system that restores ecosystems, builds social equity, and enhances systemic resilience by working with natural and social feedbacks.

Strategic Foresight: The disciplined exploration of plausible futures to inform decision-making in conditions of complexity and uncertainty.

Planetary Intelligence: The capacity to perceive, interpret and act upon systemic risks and opportunities in ways that align human activity with the Earth’s life-support systems.

Typology of Global Institutions

1. Cadell Last:

"Potential political forms of global institutions.

Global institutions Definitions/examples

(1) Neoliberal institutions: Contemporary globalization is guided via neoliberal institutions that were originally created under patronage of United States of America, and include structures like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization which have formed/are forming a global bureaucratic structure that is essentially anti-democratic,

  • A) enabling monopoly control of an international finance system designed to protect creditors,
  • B) sublimating all human activity into market activity,
  • C) creating barriers to access of basic necessities and
  • D) failing to address issues of economy-ecology sustainability.


(2) Keynesian institutions: One potential solution to the dominance of neoliberal institutions (1) would include a ‘Keynesian’ institutional construction project where a global state, presumably with top-down mechanisms characteristic of nation-states at the planetary level, would form enabling the democratic election of state officials, the regulation of global market activity, creation of a common monetary union, redistribution of income and wealth, and the organization of international state projects related to social and ecological welfare.


(3) Commons institutions: Another alternative potential solution to the dominance of neoliberal institutions

  • (1) would be the creation of ‘commons institutions’, which, instead of forming a ‘top-down’ global state bureaucracy
  • (2), would include the creation of ‘bottom-up’ distributed multi-level organizational forms that operated on
    • A) various common property regimes (essentially striving for post-property regimes),
    • B) functioned on principles of universal access (post-monetary), and
    • C) multiple context-specific egalitarian-democratic management organizations related to resources and

services that are inherently rival (i.e. scarce), and thus need management due to ‘tragedy of the commons’ problems. (Further exploration of the potential nature of ‘commons institutions’, see: Table 3)


(4) Anarchism (no global institutional forms)

Yet another potential solution to the dominance of neoliberal institutions (1) would simply be to negate the entire notion of the need for qualitatively novel large-scale political collectives (‘global institutions’in either a Keynesian or Commons form) (2, 3) and instead direct focus towards the creation and management of locally self-organized egalitarian communities. However, such an approach leaves massive questions of how to approach the real existence of neoliberal institutions, as well as how to approach planetary problems of the common sphere."

(https://cadelllast.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/last-c-2016-global-commons-in-the-global-brain.pdf)


Towards a mature technosphere

  • Frank A, Grinspoon D, Walker S (2022). Intelligence as a planetary scale process. International Journal of Astrobiology 21,47–61.

URL = https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/5077C784D7FAC55F96072F7A7772C5E5/S147355042100029Xa.pdf/intelligence-as-a-planetary-scale-process.pdf

This article proposes a four-stage evolution, three of which have already evolved:

  • a planet with a immature biosphere: no planetary intelligence
  • a planet with a mature biosphere: emergence of planetary intelligence through cooperation amongst species
  • a planet with a immature technosphere: humans produce technology that endangers the biosphere
*a planet where humanity is able to manage the effects of its technosphere for long-term sustainability of the biosphere


China's The Stability Model vs Trump's Performance Model

Gill Duran:

"Robb says, we need a government that operates more like a modern combat jet. That is, a Network State government designed for instability and piloted by computers.

Robb sees two competing models for global government:

  • The Stability Model (“China’s Approach”)

Uses censorship, surveillance, and centralized control to suppress dissent and enforce ideological uniformity. This model (Robb says) was briefly tested in the U.S. (via social media bans and deplatforming) but the effort collapsed after Elon Musk took over X (Twitter).

Robb:

The attempt to use this model in the US failed (mainly due to Musk’s acquisition of X). The jury is still out on China. However, the long-term prospects are bleak. Narrowing thought down to a narrow orthodoxy will likely eliminate the innovation China needs to keep pace with the rest of the world.


  • The Performance Model (The Red Tribe’s Attempt)

The new U.S. administration is trying to modernize governance using AI and centralized data tracking. DOGE is being developed to monitor government operations and remove opposition within the bureaucracy. Goal is to make government leaner, faster and more aligned with Red Tribe ideology by eliminating internal opposition through firings and purges.

Robb:

DOGE is centralizing control over the government’s data, from finances to personnel. Think of it as building an organizational dashboard for the entire US government, making it possible to manage, measure, and control programs and personnel in a way that has never been possible before. Also, and this will be important going forward, this data centralization makes it accessible to AI analysis and control."

(https://www.thenerdreich.com/network-state-government-ai-tech-takeover-united-states/?)

Visualizations

1. Stages of Evolving Global Self-Organization


Source: Stages of Evolving Global Self-Organization, from "What’s wrong with the world? Rationality! A critique of economic anthropology in the spirit of Jean Gebser" by Peter Pogany. Shenandoah Valley Research Press, 5. November 2010


2. Characteristics of the third global epoch, according to Peter Pogany

Source: David MacLeod added another stage, GS3, to Peter Pogany's table.

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