= "globally distributed communities united by shared identity and purpose that seek to achieve “functional sovereignty”: the capacity to govern their own affairs, manage shared resources, and steward their own culture without making territorial claims." [1]

Introduction

See our entries on:

Forms of Non-Territorial Polycentric Governance:

Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions

National Cultural Autonomy

Shared and Overlapping Sovereignty

Context from the P2P Foundation

For the P2P Foundation approach, check:

The Geopolitics of Cosmo-Localism==

The Geopolitics of Cosmo-Localism (I): Understanding the upcoming conflict and potential synergy of East, West, and Digital. Part I: the post-Civilizational thesis. [2]

The Geopolitics of Cosmo-Localism (II): How the cosmo-local phygital commons change the world order The new trinitary world order is East - West - Digital, NOT the ‘West vs the Rest’ [3]

We need Commons-Based Instruments of Expansion!! Dispatches from (Zu)Kas, the civilization-building Web3 Oasis in Southern Turkey. [4]

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

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 [5]

3.

"Balaji’s conference exists because, in much of the West, governance has stopped learning.

Infrastructure ages, bureaucracies calcify, housing stagnates, education ossifies. The startup city becomes a mirage of renewal in a civilisation that has forgotten how to iterate.

This is what my earlier essay, When Institutions Learn and When They Don’t, made palpable: systems collapse not from stupidity, but from metabolic fatigue—when the feedback loops between energy, information, and legitimacy break down.

The Network State conference was a crowd of exhausted optimists trying to reverse that fatigue with code alone. In their own way, they are the Californian cousins of (upcoming post) surplus humans—people displaced by the speed of their own inventions."

- Chor Pharn [6]

Chor Pharn's interpretation of the Network State movement

A fascinating interpretation of the 'Network State' movement:

How the institutional failure in the United States converts into globally reproducible code.

"The managerial republic, in disintegrating, has become a kind of medium—its debris are tools. The process is easiest to see in the frontier sectors where governance and enterprise blur. Start-ups organise not as firms but as temporary coordination machines: a small group raises capital through narrative, scales through software, and dissolves once imitation has replaced advantage. The life cycle resembles cultural diffusion more than industrial production. Every failure leaves behind reusable code—legal templates, funding mechanisms, technical standards, even rituals of belonging. These fragments spread far faster than any formal policy. They become the grammar of modern behaviour.

Balaji Srinivasan’s idea of the network state mistook this phenomenon for a political blueprint. He was right that the digital sphere was becoming a laboratory for governance; wrong that it would produce coherent new states. What he described as “exit” was in fact replication: a society shedding its institutions but not its logic. The start-up constitution, the DAO charter, the influencer city—none of them sustain sovereignty, yet together they distribute the American premise that coordination should be voluntary, modular, and monetised. The network state is not a destination but the transmission phase of a civilisation exporting its code.

Crypto is the most visible carrier. For all its speculative excess, it has restored a nineteenth-century idea to contemporary life: that individuals can create their own monetary and legal infrastructure if the state withdraws. Each collapse—FTX, Terra, Celsius—destroys wealth but strengthens the protocol layer that survives it. Stablecoins and tokenised deposits now settle trillions in transactions. They are the unintentional continuation of Alexander Hamilton’s financial system by other means: private credit instruments circulating in public space, guaranteed only by network consensus. Their adoption abroad, from Singapore to Lagos, signals that the dollar’s authority has become modular. The world no longer needs Washington to issue its unit of account; it can assemble a dollar from code.

Open-source governance functions in a similar way. The practices that once made Silicon Valley an industrial district—transparent repositories, permissionless contribution, shared infrastructure—have migrated into policy, science, and even religion. Movements as different as citizen science, AI research collectives, and online spiritual communities use the same coordination pattern: distributed labour, common protocol, shared narrative. These structures travel effortlessly because they ask little of law and much of imitation. They are not replacements for government; they are the reflexes of a culture that has forgotten what central authority feels like. This, then, is the logic of decay as transmission. The American state has lost coherence, but its fragments replicate themselves in code, finance, and media. Each new experiment—whether a DAO, an AI collective, or a start-up city—embodies the instinct that order can emerge from voluntary association if the right incentives are written. That instinct has become that civilisation’s true export. Even adversaries absorb it, because to operate in the global economy now means to internalise its grammar of risk, openness, and iteration. What looks like collapse from within is diffusion from without; the republic’s ruins function as seeds."

- Chor Pharn [7]

Comparison Table: Network Nations vs Network States

Contrasting Network States and Network Nations
Dimension	Network States	Network Nations
Core definition	A coordinated online community that seeks territorial control and formal sovereignty through a start-up logic, aiming to exit the current system.	A community-rooted, commons-driven civic fabric that builds functional sovereignty through culture, cooperation, and shared stewardship.
Sovereignty model	Territorial sovereignty	Functional sovereignty
Governance orientation	Top-down, investor-driven (start-up society)	Bottom-up, community-driven
Path to legitimacy	Exit-based (raise capital, acquire land, secede, negotiate recognition)	Practice-based (legitimacy through care, participation, and belonging)
Membership structure	Market-based (participants aligned through investment)	Stake-based (members as co-creators and stewards)
Organizing logic	Market logic (CEO or founder as leader)	Commons logic (collective stewardship)
Economic dynamics	Competition and extraction	Cooperation and mutual care
Institutional form	Corporate machine	Civic imagination

Source: https://networknations.network/

Key Concepts

Key Resources

Articles

Post-National Professional Elite Formation‎
- Neomedieval Invisible Colleges of the Present and Future Digital Age
- Decline of the Nation-State in an Era of Shared Transnational Values‎‎

Books

* Book: Farewell to Westphalia. Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance. By Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow.

Category:Network Nations

Contents