States, as we know them, date to the 17th century, when the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia gave shape to the notion of sovereignty. In the 21st century, international legal relations are ever more often beset by crises, prompting reflection on possible alternatives.
Anatoly Kaplan examines one such alternative, loosely dubbed a “state without a state”.
What makes a state a state
In simplified terms, any state in the classical sense needs at least three elements:
- a territory with clear borders;
- a permanent population;
- a consensus that governs citizens’ collective life (for example, a constitution).
The second looks the easiest to realise, since self-identification is a natural right. No one can forbid people from considering themselves citizens of a newly created state. Over time they may even identify as a nation formed not on an ethnic basis but as a civic nation. That is a step toward international legal personality.
Free territory, however, is in short supply: most of the interesting places are already taken. “No man’s” land is ill-suited to state-building, as the experience of Liberland and its clones suggests.
How to proceed in such conditions? The answer seems obvious: do not bind the project to territory; build the state primarily as a community of people united by shared interests and aims. Kindred ideas underpin DAO and the Network State.
One approach that could solve the territorial problem — or, rather, escape the trap it creates — would be:
- The primary territory of a state without a state is the imagination and virtual spaces of all who constitute the new nation.
- Its borders expand through citizens’ creative activity. They can create works of art or simply objects and spaces in virtual or material realities.
- The state’s borders may be visualised on physical and digital media — images, metaverses, games, a network of websites and other media.
- Any territory (imagined, digital or physical) may accede to the state via a mechanism of universal consensus, by agreeing to the union’s basic principles and rules of coexistence.
The last point merits elaboration. Here “universal consensus” means a method by which participants in a state without a state:
- mutually recognise one another as citizens with equal rights and duties;
- agree to constitute a community on the basis of at least one principle;
- accept that these agreements give rise to a new community endowed with legal personality.
A case in point is the doNONdo community. On 24 February 2025 a referendum launched a community that recognises the importance of the practice of non-action (inaction). The launch of State Without a State (SWS) was announced the same day. The team calls this merely an “act of contemporary art”, yet it can be seen as a first practical step toward creating a new country.
In doNONdo’s case, referendum participants reached consensus that the practice of non-action is meaningful and creative. They also pledged to devote at least 10 minutes a day to inaction. Thus non-action became the principle around which they united, and the launch of State Without a State an agreement on the emergence of a new community with growth potential.
Beyond symbolic acts, announcements and manifestos, doNONdo participants are linked by a database on the Solana blockchain. The community token dnd10-m1a0shan allows members to verify their affiliation without disclosing personal data, preserving pseudo-anonymity.
SWS is a state-like formation rooted in DAO and Network State ideas. It exists chiefly in digital and mental dimensions, neither claiming nor encroaching on any territory in physical reality. Under favourable circumstances and with sound legal structuring, however, property owned by SWS participants could become the common territory of this entity.
Most modern attempts to found a state begin with passports, IDs and other documents that attest to membership. That, however, is not the most important stage of building such a community.
More important are deeper symbolic layers that enable consensus around shared ideas, principles and convictions. Another essential element is the direct contribution participants make to the community, and the terms on which that contribution is made.
Hurrying to formalise such experimental constructs — and to expand bureaucracy — is likely superfluous. A new state should evolve organically, without sprinting through items on a roadmap.
New states need not replicate existing structures. They may not need presidents, prime ministers, officials or even a legal system in the form familiar to us.
A thought experiment: the state of ShaGo
Imagine a community of chess enthusiasts and their friends who play go (weiqi) with equal zeal. For years the two communities interacted and even devised a game that combines the mechanics of chess and go — ShaGo. They liked their own invention so much that they abandoned the classic games and focused exclusively on the hybrid.
One day the ShaGo devotees had a fantastical idea. Instead of setting up the usual sports association, they decided to found a network state. They proceeded in four stages.
Stage one — adopting universal consensus. The first agreement that set state-building in motion was that each participant would play ShaGo regularly and teach anyone who wished to learn, free of charge. In our imaginary example the first signatories were 33,000 people from 42 countries. The ceremony took the form of an open tournament, whose participants received tokens signifying membership in the community and the future state. Those tokens also served as ShaGo’s first currency, backed by a multi-currency basket of assets.
Stage two — defining ShaGo’s territory. As the territory of the new network state, the founders declared the following spaces:
- All official training centres in 42 countries are declared the territory of the state of ShaGo. It was decided to preserve the primacy of the law of the states in which the centres are located. A range of matters concerning the social servicing of these territories is likewise left to the host states. Thus the ShaGo players’ extravagant idea seeks maximal realisation without clashing with existing systems. These physical territories account for roughly 30% of all ShaGo territories.
- All digital spaces owned by ShaGo citizens and created or used for play and communication are declared ShaGo territory. They constitute 60% of its “area”.
- All imagined territories, conceived or reproduced in citizens’ minds, likewise become the territory of the network state. Thus the remaining 10% of ShaGo’s territory lies in its citizens’ imagination.
ShaGo thus becomes a multi-territorial polity, much of it in the digital realm, whose citizens live across the world. Digital identification and proofs of ShaGo membership allow them to use the network state’s territories worldwide under host-state conditions.
Stage three — machine rights. Once the state’s foundations were laid, the shagists (aka shagotyane) decided that the many AI systems, robots and machines that help them play ShaGo should be equal members of their nation. They held a referendum on mutual recognition between informational life forms and humans. The most autonomous AI systems received corresponding tokens and regarded the event as a new era of post-information civilisation, in which machines, robots, humans and other beings live in symbiotic relationships shaped by diverse mechanisms of socio-economic interaction.
Stage four — applying for UN membership. Having addressed questions of consensus, territory, citizenship, identification and currency, the ShaGo participants scheduled a referendum on adopting a constitution, to be held three years after the state’s founding. The founders notified the UN of the creation of the new network state and proposed that it be considered for observer status. No reply came — perhaps the letter was lost somewhere in the bureaucratic machine.
Thus the ShaGo players created, if not a fully fledged country in the usual sense, then a functioning prototype of a network state. They have a currency and an identification system, territories and rules for sharing them, and among their citizens are not only humans but informational entities in many forms.
A passage from post-capitalist reality to singularity — or to any other form of the future — is impossible without a radical rethinking of socio-economic relations. That requires, in effect, renegotiating what is what on a planetary scale. History shows that established societies rarely manage to reboot consensus in time.
As a result, new settlements are codified only after wars, crises and other mass calamities that drag on for decades. Only then does humanity arrive at another version of what is sometimes called a New World Order, sometimes a New Era, and sometimes not called anything at all.
The author of these free-ranging speculations urges nothing and proposes nothing, but thinks aloud in search of a constructive way out of the post-capitalist cul-de-sac in which society finds itself — where people no longer consume goods and services, nor even reproduce simulacra in a haze of pointless post-irony, but increasingly function as attendants to goods and services merely to sustain the illusion of civilisational prosperity.