Flee the State Fantasy

When individuals are confronted with encroaching state power in their lives they have historically had three general choices. They can: assimilate, fight, or flee the state. However, in the modern state system opportunities to flee the state have largely disappeared alongside frontiers' states administer over most spaces and technology makes individuals increasingly legible to state apparatus. Yet, there are some individuals who still look for this third strategy. In this paper I use the Sovereign Citizens Movement (SCM), an extremist movement grounded in conspiracy theories that individuals can become sovereign entities themselves, to illustrate the ways that some citizens have reinvented a flee the state strategy in an international system with no stateless spaces.