Disseminative Systems and Global Governance

Disseminative systems are identified as central to the organization and dynamism of humanity's globalized condition. Three types of disseminative systems are defined and their characteristics are delineated in terms of the considerable challenges they pose to comprehensive and effective global governance. The pervasiveness and configuration of disseminative systems presents a further range of conceptual, political, and social difficulties that frustrate a "problem solving" approach, both to the control of disseminative systems themselves and to wider global governance. Without discounting either the potential or the difficulties of conceiving and exercising governance over disseminative systems, the speed and extent of their proliferation and adaptability suggests a fundamental consideration for the development of global governance theorizing: whether its possibilities fall short of the world we have already created. Keywords: disseminative systems, global governance, complexity, connectivity, comprehension. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the Pentagon initiated the Nth Country Project, a small initiative to determine whether two amateurs (individuals with doctorates in physics but with no nuclear expertise and no access to classified information) could design a nuclear weapon. As one of the participants recalls, "[after thirty months] we produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved. The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown."1 Thirty-five years later, in 1999, the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency commissioned Project Bacchus. With little more than a budget and commercial catalogs for laboratory equipment, a team was given the task of assembling a small but functional germ factory. It took them just over a year to produce two