Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

there is no singular overarching 
organizing committee
.” And, indeed, organizers in different locations accepted (and often 
transformed) the original call to action and autonomously created specific events in their city or 
country, which brought hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of people into 
the street. The cumulative result of these efforts was the massive February 15 demonstrations.
That the so-called “coalition of the willing” launched the Iraq War anyway may call into 
question the tactics employed by the anti-war movement – in particular, I think it stresses the 
limitations of utilizing “protest” rather than “direct action” – but it does not belittle the sheer 
coordinating power of decentralized networks.
In this case, a network effectively organizes and coordinates highly dispersed and 
differentiated actors. Recall that, according to Chisholm (1989, 29) coordination involves four 
elements: 1) a plan of action must be developed; 2) the plan of action must be communicated to 
the parties who will carry it out; 3) the plan as developed and communicated must be accepted 
by those parties; and 4) relevant information must be acquired and disseminated. The
 plan
of 
action is transformed by networks into a 
call
for action. It is a call, rather than a plan because the 

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caller possesses no authority to command that others follow, and because the “plan” itself can be 
changed and adapted as autonomous organizers see fit. Thus, the networked model of initiating 
action is to issue “a call.” The call is an initial plan (element 1) and a major element of its 
success is determined by whether it is successfully communicated to other nodes (element 2), 
and whether other nodes find it to be a plan they either accept as is, or embrace in a modified 
form of their own choosing (element 3). The challenge of disseminating information (element 4) 
is reduced due to the network structure itself, as explained in previous section.
More fundamentally, these protests were coordinated without a centralized authority, 
without a consensus among all the constituent parts, without even a singular, unifying decision 
ever being made. This suggests that in a network decisions are not made, they 
emerge
. There 
are important overlaps here between networks and theories of complex systems and their core 
concept of “emergence”. As Johnson (2001, 19) explains: A complex adaptive system 
involves… 
… multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local 
rules…But it wouldn’t truly be considered 
emergent
until those local interactions 
resulted in some kind of discernible macrobehavior…a higher-level pattern 
arising out of parallel complex interactions between local agents.
No formal body claiming to represent all the different protestors agreed that people. around the 
world would protest that day. No collective decision, in that sense, was made about the decision 
to protest or what shape the protest should take. Rather, a proposal – a call for action – was put 
forward that other citizens could take up or not and shape as they saw fit, according to “local 
rules,” i.e. local norms, politics, and conditions. Organizers in different locations accepted that 
call to action and created specific events in their city or country, each of which was different.
Instead of a single unifying decision, there were many independent decisions about how exactly 
to protest. This enabled different groups to adopt different approaches to the protest, while also 

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allowing the cumulative effect to result in a cohesive global protest. The protests were 
“emergent” because the “parallel complex interactions” facilitated by the network structure 
produced a clear “macrobehavior”: the largest protest in world history In this way, networked 
forms of organization make decentralized coordination possible at a truly global scale.
A similar dynamic existed for the occupation movements of 2011, wherein occupations 
in each city were able to craft their own strategies and tactics, messages and initiatives, while all 
feeding into a larger movement (or producing a “discernible macrobehavior”). Precisely because 
of this, occupiers were able to collaborate with each other, without requiring conformity or 
consensus, and without mandating compliance with any single occupation’s decisions. In the 
next section, though, rather than thinking about the networked relationship