Flee the state fantasy: sovereign citizens and territorial sovereignty

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. Using grounded theory and a virtual ethnography of the Sovereign Citizens Movement (SCM), an extremist movement grounded in conspiracy theories that individuals can become sovereign entities, I illustrate the ways that some citizens have reinvented a flee the state strategy in an international system governed by territorial sovereignty with no stateless spaces.