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Paper short abstract

This research seeks to complicate understandings of rurality as marginalization by analysing the ideology and practice of sovereign citizens through the lens of nativism, proposing to theorize sovereignism as privilege along four different axes shaped by nativism.

Paper long abstract

Since the pandemic, the phenomenon of ‘sovereign citizens’ has gained both popularity and attention worldwide. Depending on national contexts, the terms used to describe the phenomenon include Staatsverweigerer, Reichsbürger, Selbstverwalter, sovereign citizens, or freemen. For various reasons and with different justifications – for example, with reference to earlier forms of state government, conspiracy theories, international law, pseudo-law or natural law – sovereign citizens reject the existence and legitimacy of the state, democracy and the legal order. This research draws on qualitative fieldwork among sovereign citizens and state authorities in Switzerland and in the Netherlands to challenge often prevalent victim/villain narratives and tendencies of criminalization, victimization or pathologization of the phenomenon in the literature and in public discourse. The analysis of sovereignism through the lens of nativism complicates the understanding of rurality as marginalization or deprivation (only) by theorizing sovereignism as privilege instead. The contribution introduces sovereignism as practice and ideology since the pandemic, the reactions by politicians and state authorities, and the profile, arguments and social networks of the scene. The subsequent analysis illustrates the extent to which sovereign citizens often act from a social position of relative privilege. This sovereignism as privilege is analysed along four different axes, all shaped by nativism: privileged positionalities (e.g. race, class, gender), privileged state presence/absence, privileged state response, privileged utopias. In conclusion, I reflect on what an understanding of sovereignism as privilege entails for our thinking about rurality and nativism.