Introduction: TBD

• Make the distinction between Part I and Part II

Part I: Historical Evolution

Conditions of Emergence

Network Sovereignties don’t emerge in a vacuum. They arise when specific historical, material, and social conditions align. Drawing on Harris (1968), we can identify three powerful forces that make new forms of governance possible:

1. Material conditions: These form the physical stage upon which coordination unfolds. You couldn’t build Wikipedia without computers, just as medieval trading networks depended on ships. The tools and infrastructures available at any given time directly shape what forms of collective organization are possible.
2. Worldviews: If material conditions are the stage, then worldviews are the script—the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how the world works. Worldviews include our core values (what we believe is good and right), frameworks for interpreting reality (such as science, religion, or philosophy), and systems of belonging that define group identity.
3. Pre-existing social structures: No socio-technical entity builds entirely from scratch. New forms of organization emerge from (or push against) the institutions, norms, and patterns of collective life that already exist. These inherited structures shape both the possibilities and constraints of collective behavior.

To illustrate how these three forces interweave, consider two historical examples:

In medieval Europe, advances in shipbuilding and the opening of new trade routes reshaped material conditions. New worldviews emerged, as merchants embraced both Christian brotherhood and the power of collective bargaining. Meanwhile, pre-existing social structures like city-states were already experimenting with forms of self-rule. Together, these forces shaped the Hanseatic League: a network of traders powerful enough to challenge kings while governing themselves through their own laws and assemblies.

Fast forward to 2008: cryptographers cracked the code for peer-to-peer value exchange, transforming the material conditions of digital transactions. Widespread worldviews included growing disenchantment with banks and governments, alongside cyber-libertarian dreams of internet-based money. Open-source communities already provided a pre-existing model for decentralized collaboration. From this convergence emerged the Bitcoin network, the first successful experiment in digital self-sovereign money, and the committed community that grew around it.

In both cases, no single factor was sufficient: it was their mutual reinforcement that enabled new forms of networked sovereignty to emerge and endure.

Historical Evolution & Examples

Humans have been building self-governing networks long before the Internet. Across history and cultures, these networks have taken different forms—rooted in kinship, commerce, religion, or ideology—shaping and reshaping notions of sovereignty along the way. In what follows, we trace key examples from ancient civilizations to the digital infrastructures of blockchain and AI, showing how the relationship between networks and sovereign power has evolved across eras.

The Ancient, Classic, and Medieval Eras (c. 6000 BCE - 15th century CE)

The first Network Sovereignties emerged as pragmatic responses to material and social challenges. Early farming communities needed to coordinate irrigation, defense, and resource management across growing populations and distances (Vasey, 1992; Hillis, 2022). These networks were rooted in kinship ties, customary obligations, and mutual aid, rather than formal legal institutions. Religious cosmologies (polytheistic, animist, or later monotheistic) helped legitimize these governance structures by embedding authority into divine or sacred orders (Holt, 2023). Membership was structured not by abstract citizenship but by personal relationships: to family, lords, guilds, cities, or sacred orders (Crone, 2015). Sovereignty was relational and layered, often overlapping across different social networks rather than monopolized by a single center of power.

• Ancient Mesopotamian Irrigation Networks: In ancient Mesopotamia, communities developed decentralized water management systems, coordinating resource allocation through local councils along the Tigris and Euphrates. These networks created some of the earliest examples of functional sovereignty over shared infrastructure, embedding governance directly into the management of collective material needs.
• Greek City-State Leagues: The Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues pioneered federated sovereignty, using representative councils and shared protocols to coordinate defense and diplomacy among otherwise independent city-states. These alliances demonstrated how networks could sustain collective authority without dissolving local autonomy.
• Guild Systems and Alpine Confederations: In medieval Europe, guilds organized professional self-governance through standards and market regulation, while rural communities like the Old Swiss Confederacy built federations to resist feudal dominance. Both forms showed how economic and military sovereignty could emerge from tightly bound, cooperative networks rather than hierarchical command.
• The Hanseatic League: Between the 13th and 17th centuries, the Hanseatic League linked merchant guilds and cities across Northern Europe into a commercial confederation that wielded sovereign-like powers without centralized authority, setting trade policies, standardizing maritime law, and organizing mutual defense through negotiated assemblies (“Hansetags”).

Modernity (15th century - mid-20th century)

The modern era reorganized collective life around the rise of the centralized nation-state. Three interlinked revolutions fueled this shift: military innovations (gunpowder weapons, professional armies), economic transformations (mercantile capitalism, colonial extraction), and administrative standardization (rational bureaucracies, uniform taxation) (Wimmer & Feinstein, 2010). As rulers consolidated power, new legitimating ideologies emerged: nationalism fused identity to territory (Breuilly, 1993), Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes (1651) and Locke (1689) redefined the state as humanity’s necessary protector, and religious authority increasingly gave way to secular government (Böckenförde et al., 1967). The medieval landscape of layered sovereignties such as lords, guilds, and churches vying for loyalty gradually unraveled (Engels, 1884). The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 formalized the principle: states claimed exclusive, supreme authority within bounded borders, relegating older networked forms of governance to the margins.

• Catholic and Muslim Religious Networks: Even as centralized states consolidated power, religious institutions maintained transnational systems of governance. The Catholic Church, headquartered in the Vatican, operated a global network structured through Canon Law, episcopal hierarchies, missionary outposts, and diplomatic channels. In the Islamic world, Sharia courts operated parallel to state judiciaries, while religious scholars and Sufi orders like the Naqshbandi and Qadiriyya extended their influence across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. In the Ottoman Empire, the Şeyhülislam—the chief religious authority—could issue fatwas that directly shaped legal and social life, demonstrating how religious and political sovereignty could coexist, overlap, and sometimes rival state authority.
• Armenian and Jewish Diasporas: Diasporic communities developed durable systems of autonomous governance across imperial and national boundaries. Armenian merchants from New Julfa, resettled in 17th-century Isfahan, built expansive trade networks from Venice to Manila, maintaining cohesion through kinship ties and private courts that handled business disputes internally. Similarly, Sephardic Jewish communities, dispersed around the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal, created self-governing enclaves anchored by Jewish law (Halakha) and religious courts (batei din), preserving legal autonomy even within foreign jurisdictions.

Early Contemporary Era (mid-20th century - 1970/1990)

| Institutional, solidaristic, and tribal networks reclaimed sovereign functions, while sovereignty began to fracture into overlapping, competing, and negotiated forms.

After World War II, the global order shifted dramatically. The war’s industrial, scientific, and destructive mobilizations, culminating in the atomic bomb, exposed both the heights of collective coordination and the depths of existential vulnerability (Rhodes, 1986). In its aftermath, new technologies of communication and control emerged: nuclear energy reshaped infrastructures, satellites enabled near-instant global transmission, and early computing systems began to transform information processing (Pursell, 2007). Simultaneously, foundational ideas about sovereignty unraveled. Postcolonial movements challenged the legitimacy of imperial borders (Bart, 1997); postmodern critiques unsettled assumptions about universal authority and truth (Agger, 1991); and cosmopolitan thinkers advanced visions of citizenship untethered from the nation-state (Fine, 2007). As empires crumbled and ideological certainties fractured, new organizational forms arose: international institutions, global civil society networks, and early supranational experiments that layered, competed with, and reconfigured traditional sovereign claims.

• International Organizations: After 1945, new global institutions sought to stabilize international order and extend governance beyond national borders. The United Nations created specialized agencies like the World Health Organization (WHO) for health, the International Labour Organization (ILO) for labor, UNESCO for culture, and the World Bank and IMF for economic development. New judicial institutions, including the International Court of Justice and later the International Criminal Court, established cross-border authority over legal disputes and crimes. Together, these organizations began to weave nation-states into an emerging mesh of rules, standards, and obligations that partially eclipsed traditional sovereign autonomy.
• Global Civil Society Networks: Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) pioneered new modes of transnational coordination outside formal state channels. Amnesty International (founded in 1961) mobilized grassroots human rights campaigns across countries. Greenpeace (1971) leveraged global media to catalyze environmental activism. Médecins Sans Frontières (1971) redefined humanitarian aid through neutrality and rapid international response. These networks demonstrated that collective governance, advocacy, and norm-setting could be achieved without reliance on state mechanisms.
• Ethno-Religious Survival Networks: Amid decolonization and border fixation, marginalized communities sustained parallel systems of governance to survive exclusion. Romani groups across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa maintained customary legal authority through Romani Kris courts and mobile livelihoods. The Rohingya, rendered stateless by Myanmar, developed informal leadership and mutual aid networks across refugee camps and diasporas. The Tuareg preserved clan-based governance and nomadic trade networks across the Sahara, adapting sovereign practices to the realities of ecological mobility and statelessness.
• Ethno-Religious Resistance Networks: Other ethno-religious groups organized political and military resistance to dominant state systems. The Kurds, fragmented across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, combined tribal governance with insurgent movements for autonomy and self-determination. Pashtun tribes in the Afghanistan–Pakistan borderlands upheld Pashtunwali customary law and tribal jirgas, resisting incorporation into centralized state structures. In the hills between Thailand and Myanmar, Karen and other indigenous groups maintained networks of armed resistance and self-rule, leveraging terrain, kinship, and mobility to sustain their autonomy.
• European Union: Originating as an economic cooperation project after World War II, the European Union evolved into the most advanced supranational governance structure to date. From the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) to the Treaty of Rome (1957), the EU developed institutions like the European Parliament, European Commission, and European Court of Justice. Member states ceded sovereignty in specific domains like trade, competition, human rights while retaining control in others, illustrating that sovereignty could be layered, pooled, and functionally distributed across multiple institutional levels.

The Information Age: When Networks Went Digital (1970/90-onwards)

The computing revolution of the 1970s unleashed a profound shift in human coordination. Personal computers decentralized access to information, empowering individuals and small groups to create, share, and organize outside traditional institutions. As the Internet spread in the 1990s, the cost of coordination collapsed, enabling the rise of new networked forms of governance. Competing visions quickly emerged: crypto-libertarians like Timothy C. May (1994) imagined encrypted, stateless societies; Yochai Benkler (2006) envisioned open collaboration and non-market production; while critics like Evgeny Morozov (2011) warned of rising surveillance and corporate capture. Even as billions remained excluded, tech companies consolidated unprecedented power, increasingly acting as “digital sovereigns” through protocols, platforms, and algorithmic governance (Pasquale, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). Meanwhile, states adapted: through firewalls, digital identity systems, cybersecurity institutions, and regulations over digital data, they extended sovereignty into the networked digital space, giving rise to a new hybrid form: digital statehood. The Information Age revealed that networks could both expand human freedom and deepen new forms of control.

• Online Communities and Forums: In the early Internet era, people experimented with self-governance online. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) like CBBS (1978) and USENET (1980) let users organize discussions without centralized control. Slashdot (1997) introduced karma systems and distributed moderation. Wikipedia (2001) developed layered, community-driven editing protocols. Reddit (2005) allowed subreddits to create their own governance rules.
• Open Source Communities: Software developers pioneered new collaborative models. The GNU Project (1983) defended software freedom through protective licenses. Linux (1991) demonstrated that a globally distributed volunteer network could create sophisticated technical systems through merit-based contribution. The Apache Software Foundation (1999) institutionalized open source governance. These principles spread beyond code to movements like Creative Commons (2001), Open Science, and Open Hardware.
• Digital Activist Networks: Activists leveraged digital tools for cross-border mobilization. The Battle of Seattle (1999) saw decentralized organizing via independent media sites. The Arab Spring (2010–2012) used social media to coordinate uprisings. Occupy Wall Street (2011) deployed tools like Loomio for collective decision-making. Meanwhile, the cypherpunk movement built tools like Tor (2002) and Signal to resist surveillance and defend privacy at the infrastructural layer (Deibert, 2020).
• Corporate Platforms: As digital ecosystems matured, major technology firms such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft began to operate as de facto sovereigns. These companies control key infrastructures; from search engines, to cloud services, app stores, and social media networks. Since they establish rules that govern economic exchange, public discourse, and data flows, they create profound structural dependencies with other sovereigns. These new Networked Sovereignties came with an array of challenges: opaque governance, commodification of personal data, lack of democratic accountability, and manipulation of public discourse (De Filippi & Beer, 2025).
• Digital Statehood: Nation-states adapted to the networked world by extending sovereignty into digital space. Some, like China’s Great Firewall and Russia’s sovereign internet law, sought to re-territorialize cyberspace through technical barriers. Others, like Estonia’s e-residency program, expanded jurisdiction digitally, offering identities and services to global users. Regulatory frameworks like the European Union’s GDPR projected national authority outward, regulating data flows beyond their physical borders and institutionalizing sovereignty in the digital realm (De Filippi & Beer, 2025).

The Web3 and AI Ages (2008 - onwards)

The early 21st century has seen the rise of two powerful forces reshaping collective organization: blockchain and artificial intelligence. In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin introduced a decentralized system for exchanging value without banks or states. Ethereum (2015) expanded the paradigm by enabling smart contracts—self-executing code that coordinates behavior without centralized intermediaries. These breakthroughs fueled the emergence of new models of governance, from decentralized finance (DeFi) to blockchain-based identity systems. This shift sparked a wave of ideologies. Crypto-maximalists want to escape fiat currencies entirely. Solarpunks imagine sustainable, community-owned digital commons. Lunarpunks focus on privacy and resistance to surveillance. Venture capitalists are trying to tokenize every aspect of social life, while self-described “degens” embrace wild experimentation with profit-driven, anti-institutional systems (Swartz 2016, Craib 2022, Shimony 2024). In this context, blockchain systems evolved into programmable political architectures, enabling groups of pseudonymous actors to create, enforce, and adapt new systems of rule beyond the reach of the state.

• Blockchain Networks Communities: Bitcoin marked the first successful implementation of a decentralized digital currency, maintained not by a single entity but by a polycentric network of miners, developers, node operators, and users. Its governance is structured through a layered model of protocol rules, financial incentives (like mining rewards), and social consensus among participants over governance decisions. Following Bitcoin’s success, an entire ecosystem of layer-1 and layer-2 networks proliferated—such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana, Optimism, and Arbitrum—each experimenting with new forms of protocol governance, economic coordination, and community-driven sovereignty​​ (De Filippi et. al, 2024)
• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: DAOs are online organizations governed by smart contracts rather than corporate hierarchies. One early example, The DAO (2016), raised $150 million before a hack triggered a major split in the Ethereum network. Since then, DAOs have evolved and have incorporated mechanisms to interface with states. dOrg, founded in 2019, became the first legally recognized DAO LLC in the U.S. Today, most DAOs use token-based voting to manage funding, upgrades, and membership, offering more transparent alternatives to traditional management structures.
• Network States: In The Network State (2022), Balaji Srinivasan proposed digital-first communities that coordinate online, crowdfund territory acquisition, and seek diplomatic recognition. These “start-up societies” combine crypto-libertarian ideals with Silicon Valley’s ethos of agile iteration. One real-world example inspired by this model is Próspera (2017), a privately governed charter city on Roatán Island, Honduras, intended to offer low taxes, flexible regulations, private arbitration, and governance-as-a-service.
• Network Nations: A year later, researchers proposed Network Nations as an alternative to Network States. Rather than focusing on territory acquisition, Network Nations are translocal communities built around a shared identity, culture, and purpose, exercising functional sovereignty across digital and physical spaces without anchoring their legitimacy in land control. They mutualize resources, self-govern across jurisdictions, and engage in collective action. A leading example is ReFi DAO, which evolved from a founder-led Web3 hub into a mesh of Local Nodes practicing ecological regeneration while federating through digital commons infrastructure like the Regen CoordiNATION.
• Network Cities: As a third alternative, Network Cities prioritize local autonomy and intergenerational living through distributed, community-first approaches (Hillis, 2024). These are federations of semi-autonomous neighborhoods linked by digital coordination layers. An example is Cabin, which evolved from a creators residency outside Austin into a polycentric Network City blending onchain governance through DAOs and token-voting with physical place-making, resource-sharing, and communal ritual-building across its expanding neighborhoods.

Artificial intelligence is also profoundly reshaping how we think about governance and sovereignty. These systems can process vast amounts of data, detect patterns, and make increasingly complex decisions with minimal human oversight. The launch of ChatGPT in 2022, powered by large language models (LLMs), brought AI into everyday life, spreading rapidly into schools, law firms, programming, and creative industries. This inflection point ignited fierce debates about the future political economy of intelligence: effective accelerationists (e/acc) push for rapid, unconstrained development; AI safety researchers warn of existential and systemic risks; digital humanists call for systems that uphold rights and participatory governance; and open-source advocates demand that AI infrastructures remain publicly accessible. As AI systems increasingly mediate decision-making, coordination, and control, they raise urgent questions about the nature of sovereignty itself: who designs, governs, and owns the infrastructures that will increasingly structure collective life.

• Agentic Networks and AI-driven DAOs: Although current AI systems still require human oversight, their expanding capacity for autonomous decision-making points toward a future where machine-led governance operates with minimal human intervention. As Shimony (2025) suggests, AI-driven DAOs could emerge in which algorithms not only execute decisions but also generate proposals, allocate resources, and dynamically recalibrate governance frameworks. In such architectures, AI agents would no longer be mere tools but would function as quasi-sovereign actors: negotiating, organizing, and enforcing decisions across distributed environments. These formations could develop new logics of agency, legitimacy, and political membership, fundamentally challenging existing concepts of sovereignty and human authority.

Part II: Political Relevance/Impact - Network Sovereignties in the Digital Age

Since the rise of the Information Age, three distinct forms of Network Sovereignties have proliferated:´

The digital landscape is characterized by three distinct categories of actors with contending claims to a new form of “network sovereignty” over the digital realm: corporate platforms, nation-states, and networked communities.

1. Corporate Platform Sovereigns: The Rise of Techno-Feudalism

A striking manifestation of network sovereignty comes from the rise of large digital platforms—such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft—which control key services and infrastructure (e.g. search, app stores, e-commerce, social media), setting and enforcing rules that shape public discourse, economic activity, and data flows. Shoshana Zuboff (2019) and other critics (e.g. Pasquale, 2023) argue that these firms have accumulated governing power that enables them to act as “quasi-sovereign” actors.

1. Spatial Dimension: These platform giants have constructed vast, enclosed digital spaces sometimes called walled gardens – that are not geographic but infrastructural—defined by proprietary protocols, algorithms, and interfaces. Their boundaries are enforced not by physical borders but by APIs, logins, and software permissions. Julie Cohen (2017) terms these “techno-feudal” spaces: governed, enclosed, and extractive. These platform territories are modular, interoperable only on their terms, and architected to maintain user dependency and competitive advantage.

2. Personal Dimension: The populations of tech giants often rivals—and sometimes even surpasses—those of large nation-states. For instance, Meta’s Facebook hosts over three billion users, a population larger than any existing country. Users engage under quasi-citizenship: subject to platform rules via terms of service, algorithmic governance, and discretionary enforcement. While governed, they lack the rights or democratic input expected in traditional polities.

3. Institutional Dimension: Platforms maintain institutional architectures that mimic state functions—moderation policies, trust and safety teams, and quasi-judicial bodies like the Oversight Board. These structures often operate beyond the reach of democratic oversight, creating what Frank Pasquale (2023) calls “functional sovereignty”: the ability to define and enforce norms of participation, communication, and commerce within a governed domain, without needing formal recognition from the international system.

Reflections on Sovereignty: Platforms’ network sovereignty demonstrates how authority can be exercised over digital space and networked populations, with little recourse to territorial jurisdiction or democratic accountability. Indeed, the sovereignty of digital platforms is not grounded in formal international law but enacted through infrastructural dominance, user dependency, and market entrenchment. As Pinto (2018) notes, entire nations depend on a few companies for critical infrastructure, creating asymmetric power relations with no democratic oversight. At the same time, platforms require states (for contract enforcement, intellectual property regimes, etc.) to secure their position—demonstrating both autonomy from, and dependence on traditional sovereign structures (De Filippi & Belli 2021).

2. Digital Statehood: Extending Nation-States into the Digital Realm

Far from being passive observers to this corporate ascendance, nation-states are developing their own strategies to assert sovereignty in networked spaces. Rather than delegating authority to tech platforms, many states are extending their sovereignty claims into the digital domain through surveillance infrastructure and regulatory regimes that attempt to govern their citizens’ digital life.

1. Spatial Dimension: Some states are actively re-territorializing the digital realm by creating virtual borders that solidify regulatory oversight and strengthen jurisdictional claims. China’s “Great Firewall” represents the most comprehensive attempt to create a controlled national digital space through technical means. Russia’s “sovereign internet” law similarly aims to create a nationally bounded internet infrastructure that can operate independently from the global Internet network, if necessary. Conversely, some states are extending their territorial presence beyond physical borders. Estonia’s e-residency program, for instance, allows non-Estonians to establish digital identities and businesses under Estonian jurisdiction, effectively expanding the state's digital territory.

2. Personal Dimension: Nation-states are asserting claims over citizens in the digital realm, regardless of the platforms they use (Rejiers, Orgad, De Filippi 2023). Some states have engaged in what Ziyaad Bhorat and Martin Rauchbauer (2023) call “networked authoritarianism”— the strategic use of information technology by authoritarian regimes to surveil, repress, and manipulate domestic and foreign populations. China’s social credit system shows how states can monitor, evaluate, and control subjects through datafication (Cheung & Chen, 2021). Similarly, a few democratic states are similarly extending citizenship into digital realms, with digital identity systems like India's Aadhaar and Estonia’s e-ID, bringing both digital and physical identities under state oversight.

3. Institutional dimension: States are building new institutions to exercise sovereignty in the digital realm. These include dedicated cybersecurity agencies and specialized cyber military commands (e.g. the U.S. CYBERCOM). The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) represents an institutional attempt to project regulatory sovereignty across digital networks, backed by significant enforcement mechanisms and financial penalties. States are also increasingly engaging in digital diplomacy—negotiating agreements that establish norms of behavior in cyberspace, such as the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime or various bilateral cyber non-aggression pacts.

Reflections on sovereignty: Over the past decade, “digital sovereignty” has emerged as a central theme in policy debates—particularly in Europe (Pohle & Thiel, 2020). It is generally framed as a pathway to a more ordered, value-driven, regulated and therefore secure digital space—promising to address a broad range of challenges, from safeguarding individual rights to ensuring political and legal enforceability as well as fair economic competition. However, the nationalisation of cyberspace also represents a significant transformation of sovereignty itself, as states must increasingly contend with the technical realities of borderless networks that resist traditional territorial control. This has led to a hybrid form of sovereignty that combines traditional state authority with new technical affordances, creating what might be termed “digital statehood”—a form of sovereign authority that extends state power into networked spaces while adapting to their unique characteristics and constraints.

3. Networked Communities: Civil Society Seeking Political Agency

The third actor category emerges directly from the social fabric of global connectivity itself: networked communities. These communities are formed through voluntary association and sustained interaction through both online and offline spaces, interrelating different people and places across the world. These range from open-source software communities and decentralized autonomous organizations, to diaspora networks and translocal cultural movements. Despite their diversity, they share common traits: they are socially connected, digitally networked, and geographically dispersed.

1. Spatial Dimension: Networked communities operate primarily through shared digital commons and platforms built around community governance rather than corporate control or state regulation. The Bitcoin network, for instance, exists as a distributed ledger maintained across thousands of computers worldwide, creating a form of sovereign space that transcends national borders. Similarly, federated social networks like Mastodon establish interconnected but autonomous “instances” that function as semi-sovereign digital territories. These spaces are defined not by geographic boundaries or corporate ownership, but by shared protocols, technical standards, and governance norms.

2. Personal Dimension: Networked communities construct their populations through voluntary affiliation rather than citizenship or platform enrollment. Members join based on shared values, interests, or identity, progressively building the cultural and social foundations of nationhood—a shared sense of identity, purpose, history, and future vision. The Ethereum ecosystem, for example, has fostered a distinct community identity with its own cultural practices, specialized language, and collective narratives. Similarly, diaspora networks leverage digital tools to maintain cultural continuity and political solidarity across national borders, forming transnational communities with their own political agency.

3. Institutional dimension: From the formal governance processes of major open-source projects to the algorithmic consensus mechanisms of blockchain networks, networked communities are building institutional capacity for self-governance. Yet these communities typically operate outside formal political recognition, relying on specific organizations (e.g., the Ethereum Foundation) to coordinate large-scale collective action or represent community interests in relation to established political entities. Balaji Srinivasan’s (2023) concept of the "Network State" ("a highly aligned online community with the capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states") represents a novel approach to institutionalizing these communities, which has been adopted by several initiatives, such as Praxis Society (2024) among others. Yet despite its disruptive rhetoric, the Network State largely recreates traditional forms of sovereignty, integrating the corporate logics of tech startups into a nation-state institution.

Reflections on sovereignty: The sovereignty claims of networked communities reveal both the promise and limitations of digitally-mediated political agency. This raises an important question: Can emerging forms of network sovereignty serve collective self-determination rather than corporate profit or state control? As digital networks become primary mediums of human association, the question isn't if new political forms will emerge—but which ones. If we want democracy to thrive in the digital realm, we must design novel institutions that enable networked communities to exercise meaningful self-governance in the digital world.

Conceptual Axes (rewritten)

This is why it is important to engage with the politics of this space - it is an arena where old politics are emerging in a new way.

Among these, community-led Network Sovereignties represent the most radical departure from traditional state-centric models of sovereignty. Where Westphalian sovereignty ties authority to coercive power, fixed territory, and exclusive allegiance, community-led networks construct sovereignty differently:

1. From Coercion to Voluntary Participation: Traditional states maintain order through legal compulsion, police force, and border enforcement. Community-led networks rely on opt-in protocols where participation is a choice, not an imposition.
2. From Territoriality to Translocality: Instead of claiming bounded land, networked communities build shared spaces, be it physical or digital, where proximity is defined by relational affinity rather than geography. Sovereign space is dynamic, modular, and migratable.
3. From Exclusive Allegiance to Overlapping Memberships: In contrast to the single, exclusive citizenship of traditional states, individuals can simultaneously belong to multiple network communities, each with their own rights, obligations, and governance systems. Sovereignty becomes layered, situational, and plural.
4. From External to Internal Legitimacy: Network communities do not depend on external diplomatic recognition to exercise governance. Their legitimacy derives from within, and stems from alignment with the members interests or values and the credibility of governance.

Networked communities also pursue diverse strategies in relation to traditional states. Some resist state authority outright—privacy-focused crypto networks, for example, aim to circumvent state surveillance and monetary control. Others seek collaboration, like Network Cities that negotiate partnerships with local governments to secure partial autonomy. Still others bypass state frameworks altogether: open-source communities build critical infrastructures without engaging formal political systems, while initiatives like Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State project attempt to replicate and eventually gain diplomatic recognition as sovereign entities.

These shifts do not mean that Networked Communities are inherently more empowering or egalitarian than traditional nation-states. While they offer novel forms of participation—governance based on shared values or interests rather than territorial birthright and the freedom to navigate multiple overlapping communities—they also introduce new vulnerabilities: fragmented authority, opaque governance mechanisms, heightened risks of exclusion or economic dependency, and unstable legitimacy without clear mechanisms for accountability.

Without institutionalized rights protections, Networked Communities may replicate or even intensify existing power asymmetries, exacerbated by digital divides in access, literacy, and resources. Their fluid structures can translate into fragility; easily captured by capital, technical elites, or charismatic figures. “Opt-in” governance may obscure forms of soft coercion: exit becomes illusory if an individual’s social and economic life is embedded within the system. And the very affordances that enable decentralized self-organization can equally enable anarcho-capitalist fragmentation, crypto-authoritarian control, or marketized sovereignty, where governance becomes the privilege of those who design protocols or accumulate tokens.

Conclusion (to be rewritten)