Introduction: a pandemic stress test of democracy

The COVID-19 pandemic acted as an unexpected stress test for democracy worldwide. On one hand, it accelerated what might be called ‘tele-life’: in the span of weeks, billions shifted their work, education, worship and even intimate relations online. On the other, it exposed the radical vulnerability of those excluded from stable welfare regimes, who suddenly depended on meager state transfers, fragile community solidarity or sheer luck. As Maerz et al. (Reference Maerz, Lührmann, Hellmeier and Grahn2020) argued, many regimes slid into ‘pandemic backsliding’, while Levy and Malamud (Reference Levy and Malamud2020) suggested a countertrend of ‘pandemic forthsliding’, where crisis management unexpectedly deepened democratic practices. As Beck (Reference Beck2006) anticipated in the world risk society thesis, global crises generate fragile forms of cosmopolitan solidarity; COVID-19 exemplified this dynamic, producing a shared experience across borders while revealing how democracy remains territorially confined. From a constitutional perspective, the pandemic also exposed the limits of emergency powers and the calibration of derogations of rights under conditions of scientific uncertainty, a theme developed by Pervou (Reference Pervou2023) and Scheppele and Pozen (Reference Scheppele, Pozen, Maduro and Kahn2020). In this sense, the pandemic both amplified digital adaptability and revealed structural exclusion – highlighting not only the resilience of constitutional orders, but also their fragility when fundamental rights are territorially locked (Pervou Reference Pervou2023; Scheppele and Pozen Reference Scheppele, Pozen, Maduro and Kahn2020). In short, it posed the very question at the heart of global constitutionalism: How to safeguard rights and the rule of law when crises spill across borders. It thus foregrounds the transboundary adjudication of rights that global constitutionalism takes as its central concern.

Yet most dominant theories and measures of democracy – Freedom House, V-Dem, Polity – remain stubbornly territorial, assessing the quality of democracy at the level of states rather than peoples. As Havercroft (Reference Havercroft2011) argues, much of democratic theory itself remains captive to the conceptual grammar of sovereignty, making it difficult to envision forms of belonging that transcend territorial containers. What such indices cannot easily capture is the extent to which individuals, across borders, belong to political communities by choice rather than by the accidents of blood or soil. As several critics have noted, this state centrism obscures the lived experience of citizens whose affiliations are multiple and portable, pointing to the need for indicators that follow persons rather than territories (see, e.g., Fox Reference Fox2005; Jakobson and Kalev Reference Jakobson, Kalev and Demetriou2013). As Chernilo (Reference Chernilo and Delanty2021) argues, the pandemic made visible a truly cosmopolitan experience in which national, international and global dimensions appeared as co-constitutive rather than separate, underscoring the inadequacy of methodological nationalism. The pandemic invites us, therefore, to rethink democracy itself: not merely as a territorial order, but as a potential architecture of unterritorial affiliation.

This proposal also speaks directly to the literature on constitutional pluralism and postsovereignty constitutionalism. As Walker (Reference Walker2002), Maduro (Reference Maduro and Walker2003) and Kumm (Reference Kumm, Dunoff and Trachtman2009) show, overlapping constitutional orders – national, supranational and international – already challenge sovereignty as a singular authority. Peters (Reference Peters, Suami, Peters, Vanoverbeke and Kumm2018) and Fassbender (Reference Fassbender2009) extend this insight, noting that global constitutional law increasingly treats individuals as subjects of rights and obligations. Unterritorial democracy radicalizes this move: it suggests that not only legal authority but also political belonging can be plural and overlapping. In this sense, pan-citizenship resonates with the Latin American project of Ius Constitutionale Commune (ICCAL) (von Bogdandy Reference von Bogdandy2015; von Bogdandy et al. Reference von Bogdandy, Ferrer, Morales and Piovesan2017), which rethinks authority across borders and levels. Where constitutional pluralists study the coexistence of legal orders, unterritorial democracy imagines the coexistence of multiple demoi – voluntary and portable communities that follow persons across borders. It aligns with Wiener’s (Reference Wiener2018) ‘practice turn’, emphasizing lived and contested norms, and situates unterritorial belonging within comparative constitutional debates in Latin America (Coddou McManus Reference Coddou McManus2022) as part of the broader trajectory of global constitutionalism.

It is against this backdrop of constitutional pluralism that the present essay sketches an alternative horizon. Drawing inspiration from traditions as diverse as panarchism (De Puydt; Nettlau; Zube; Rozeff), Austro-Marxist proposals for nonterritorial autonomy (Renner; Bauer) and the programmatic vision of the Jewish Bund, I explore whether democracy can be reorganized along overlapping, voluntary and nonterritorial lines. The core question is not whether minorities can secede or physically relocate, but whether individuals might simultaneously belong to multiple political communities – pan-citizenships whose rights, representation and services travel with them across borders.

The argument is necessarily exploratory. It does not predict the inevitable demise of the Westphalian order, nor does it prescribe a utopia detached from political realities. Rather, it draws from historical precedents and contemporary proto-examples to suggest that digital affordances and plural identities make unterritorial democracy newly thinkable – and normatively urgent. In this respect, the proposal not only intersects but also diverges from cosmopolitan democracy (Held Reference Held1995; Archibugi Reference Archibugi2008), which envisions a single demos extended to the global scale. Unterritorial democracy, by contrast, multiplies the sites of belonging: it imagines overlapping communities anchored in voluntary affiliation rather than in a universal polity. As Ostrom (Reference Ostrom2010) and Aligica and Tarko (Reference Aligica and Tarko2012) remind us, polycentric governance is not utopian fiction but a well-documented feature of resilient political systems, offering a conceptual foothold for thinking beyond state-centric templates.

Unterritorial democracy is not proposed as a utopian alternative to the state, but as a normative–analytical framework for interpreting and guiding transformations already under way. Analytically, it makes sense of emerging practices of portable and overlapping citizenship; normatively, it identifies their democratic potentials and limits. The argument therefore operates on two interconnected levels: it reconstructs the logics visible in existing institutions while outlining a horizon of accountability for multiterritorial polities. This dual stance situates the essay within the tradition of critical constitutionalism, in which empirical mapping and normative design are mutually informing tasks.

From territorial demos to pan-citizenship

Modern democracy is still largely tethered to geography. We belong to a political community not because of a deliberate choice, but because of accidents of jus soli (birthplace) and jus sanguinis (parentage). Citizenship, in practice, has been inherited – an artifact of where one happens to be born and to whom. To be sure, migration offers the possibility of changing political communities, but for most people moving is prohibitively costly, legally restricted or socially unthinkable (Altman Reference Altman2022). As James Scott (Reference Scott1998) has argued, this territorial fixation is part of a broader project of state ‘legibility’, where borders, censuses and registries not only render populations administrable but also lock belonging into space. Unterritorial democracy seeks to unsettle precisely this logic, making affiliation portable rather than mappable.

The pandemic sharpened this paradox. A worker teaching online in Montevideo could collaborate seamlessly with colleagues in Toronto or Delhi, yet remained locked into the rights and duties of a Uruguayan citizen. Political belonging was as immobile as ever, even as work, communication and culture transcended borders. This disjuncture shows how ‘tele-life’ created functional communities without borders, while citizenship itself remained a rigid territorial cage. As Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1991) reminds us, nations themselves are ‘imagined communities’, sustained by shared practices rather than geography. Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor2004) further underscores that modern social imaginaries provide the shared frameworks through which people make sense of their collective existence. If nations can be imagined in this way, democratic belonging too can be re-imagined – not as territorially fixed, but as open to overlapping and portable affiliations.

What if citizenship were organized differently? Instead of being tied to territory, could it be structured around voluntary affiliation – a pan-citizenship chosen and rechosen across a lifetime, much as individuals select religions, professions or associations? Such a model would recognize that identities are multiple and overlapping: one might be simultaneously part of a linguistic community, a religious fellowship and a professional guild, each with its own institutions of representation and governance. As panarchist writers from De Puydt (Reference De Puydt1860) to Rozeff (Reference Rozeff2008) argued, political belonging could in principle be made as voluntary as choosing a church or a union.

It is important to differentiate two dimensions that are often conflated. Portability means that rights and representation follow the person wherever she moves – citizenship travels. Voluntariness, by contrast, means that political affiliation itself can be chosen or combined. Many existing institutions – dual nationality, extraterritorial voting or indigenous registers – embody portability without voluntariness: they extend state membership, not freedom of association. Panarchist thought pushes further, imagining voluntariness as a principle of democratic design. Unterritorial democracy occupies the intermediate space: it seeks to universalize portability while gradually institutionalizing selective voluntariness under constitutional safeguards.

Constitutionally, this thought experiment is no longer purely speculative: comparative jurisprudence already recognizes portable forms of membership. For instance, Italy and Portugal have long extended voting rights to their citizens abroad through constitutional provisions, while the Colombian Constitutional Court (C-351/2017) has emphasized the right of emigrants to maintain political participation across borders. These cases suggest that pan-citizenship is not a utopia detached from law, but rather an extrapolation of doctrines on dual nationality, extraterritorial voting and cultural autonomy already present in contemporary constitutional practice (Rubio-Marín Reference Rubio-Marín2006; Lafleur Reference Lafleur2013; Ellis Reference Ellis, Ellis, Navarro, Morales and Braun2007). A parallel principle is visible in supranational jurisprudence: in Micheletti v. Spain (Court of Justice of the European Union 1992), the Court of Justice of the European Union affirmed the portability of Union citizenship, treating belonging as a person-linked rather than a territory-bound status.

The idea is not utopian. Historical precedents abound. Nonterritorial autonomy (NTA), developed in the Austro-Marxist tradition of Renner and Bauer, already envisioned polities defined by culture rather than soil, with self-government over language, education, religion and personal status (Renner Reference Renner1907). More recently, indigenous registers in places like New Zealand and Chile have demonstrated how separate electoral rolls can give dispersed minorities political voice without demanding territorial secession. These cases hint at designs where belonging follows persons, not places.

Pan-citizenship, then, is not about escaping the state but about pluralizing democracy itself. It asks whether we can extend the consent of the governed, in Jefferson’s sense, beyond territorial confinement – allowing people to choose and combine memberships that reflect their actual lives, values and solidarities. As the Declaration of Independence (1776) put it, governments derive ‘their just powers from the consent of the governed’ – and nothing in that principle requires such consent to be territorially bounded. In doing so, democracy might become less an accident of birth and more an expression of will.

Intellectual genealogies: panarchism, Austro-Marxism and the bund

Every proposal for unterritorial democracy requires a lineage, and this one is not invented from scratch. Many nations are stateless, as Minahan (Reference Minahan2016) and Bell (Reference Bell2017) remind us, a reality that highlights both the urgency and the difficulty of designing institutions not anchored in territory. The very fact that modern states crystallized through war-making and resource extraction, as Tilly (Reference Tilly1990) argued, reminds us that territorial citizenship is the contingent outcome of coercive bargains rather than an inevitable democratic form. As Elias (Reference Elias2000 [Reference Elias1939]) further showed, what appear as naturalized political arrangements are the product of long civilizing processes through which central authorities monopolized violence and cultural codes. Three genealogies, in particular, illuminate the path ahead: panarchist experiments, Austro-Marxist visions of nonterritorial autonomy and the programmatic activism of the Jewish Bund. Each emerged from specific historical struggles – debated in pamphlets, defended in congresses and enacted in working-class movements – demonstrating that unterritorial democracy has long been imagined not merely in theory but also in lived practice.

Panarchism emerged in the nineteenth century as a radical thought experiment. In 1860, Paul Émile de Puydt suggested that individuals should be able to ‘subscribe’ to governments the way they choose religions, coexisting in the same physical space yet governed by different rules. Max Nettlau and later John Zube revived this idea of overlapping polities, often dismissed as eccentric but strikingly prescient in an age of digital platforms. As Michael Rozeff (Reference Rozeff2008) bluntly put it: if individuals can freely choose their faith – or none at all – why not their political community? Panarchism anticipated a world in which governance, like association, could be portable, voluntary and plural. As John Zube later defined it, panarchy is ‘the realization of as many different and autonomous communities as are wanted by volunteers for themselves, all non-territorially coexisting, side by side and intermingled … as different churches are’ (cited in panarchy.org). Seen through today’s lens, panarchism foreshadowed theories of adaptive, nested governance described as panarchy in ecology (Allen et al. Reference Allen, Angeler, Garmestani and Gunderson2014) and resonates with Kukathas’s vision of a liberal archipelago, where individuals navigate a mosaic of voluntary communities rather than being bound by inherited membership (Kukathas Reference Kukathas2003). In a similar vein, Levy (Reference Levy2015) underscores that pluralism and freedom are sustained not by a single overarching order but by the coexistence of multiple, sometimes conflicting, normative communities.

Austro-Marxism faced a different challenge: how to hold together the multiethnic Habsburg Empire without repression or breakup. Karl Renner and Otto Bauer developed the idea of nonterritorial autonomy (NTA): cultural nations would govern themselves in matters of language, education and personal status, regardless of where their members lived. Territorial authorities would continue to manage external affairs, policing and infrastructure, while national communities controlled their cultural reproduction.Footnote ¹ Renner (Reference Renner1907) argued that real equality also required the right to use one’s vernacular in court, since otherwise poorer citizens would remain disadvantaged against both the dominant nationality and their own elites who could afford lawyers fluent in the imperial language.

In his broader writings, Renner depicted nationalism itself as an obstacle to economic and cultural development, best confined to the realms of culture and communication. He therefore defended administrative and economic units encompassing diverse nationalities, with cultural autonomy guaranteed to each group but coordinated through a central government. Crucially, he also advanced the principle of ‘personal nationality’, whereby individuals could choose their national affiliation independently of residence, eliminating the very notion of national minorities tied to territory and reducing the need to draw ethnic borders (Kann Reference Kann1951). Crucially, Renner also advanced the principle of ‘personal nationality’, whereby individuals could choose their national affiliation independently of residence, eliminating the very notion of minorities tied to territory. As Reifowitz (Reference Reifowitz2008: 4) summarizes, under Renner’s scheme ‘in the elections for the “nationalities” chamber, a citizen would vote to elect representatives of his people irrespective of where he lived within the Monarchy (or relevant region or district)’.

Bauer defined nationality as ‘the totality of men united through a community of fate into a community of character’ (Bauer [Reference Bauer1907] Reference Bauer2000: 101). As Oberle (Reference Oberle2020) shows, he favored granting cultural autonomy to every national group in the Empire, yet denied that Jews constituted a nationality – praising their historical role while advocating assimilation, which drew sharp criticism from Zionists.

Historians have noted Bauer’s complex identity, often summarized – following Rozenblit’s notion of a tripartite identity – as ‘ethnically Jewish, culturally German, and politically Austrian’ (Reifowitz Reference Reifowitz2017: 9, drawing on Rozenblit Reference Rozenblit2001). After the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, Bauer briefly served as foreign minister of the new Austrian Republic (1918–1919), resigning when his main objectives – a merger with Germany and retention of German-speaking Tyrol – failed. This paradox of identity – minority by origin, majority by culture, internationalist by politics – helps explain what Oberle (Reference Oberle2020) calls his ‘negative identity’, the tension of being at once socialist internationalist and minority nationalist.

While Renner tended to view national autonomy in more pragmatic and institutional terms, Bauer’s ambivalence revealed the ideological and personal strains of Austro-Marxism. For Bauer and later for Bundist theorists such as Medem, defending cultural rights was not a bourgeois distraction but a socialist necessity, essential to confronting oppression within a multiethnic working class (Gechtman Reference Gechtman2007). Austro-Marxism was thus both pragmatic and visionary: bureaucratic in design, radical in principle.

Liberal democracy is based on political equity among citizens – one person, one vote. Yet, minority groups, whether national, religious or linguistic, are usually disadvantaged within such majoritarian frameworks. Many therefore rally around the banner of self-determination, while majorities perceive their advantage to be at risk. Crucially, self-determination is often conflated with separatism, at least from the majority’s perspective, even though the two are not synonymous. Demands for self-determination need not imply territorial autonomy, and equating them automatically with secession is both politically misleading and analytically reductive.

The Bund (General Jewish Workers’ Union), founded in 1897 in Vilna, brought these debates into the crucible of socialist politics.Footnote ² The Bund organized Jewish workers in Yiddish, creating unions, libraries and schools, while rejecting both assimilation and Zionist territorial nationalism. Its principle of doykeyt (‘hereness’) demanded rights where Jews already lived. As Brossat and Klingberg (Reference Brossat, Klingberg and Fernbach2016) remind us, Bundists confronted antisemitism not only from the state and bourgeois elites, but also from fellow workers who discriminated against Jews.

Confronting hostility on multiple fronts, they argued – earlier than most Marxists – that defending cultural rights for minorities was not a bourgeois diversion but a socialist necessity. In doing so, they also distanced themselves from notions of klal yisroel – the idea that all Jews formed a single metaphysical nation – and insisted instead that Jewish nationhood was cultural, grounded in the everyday life of Yiddish speakers. Bundist solidarity, as the saying went, was not about lofty abstractions but about whether you ‘put sjug on your fish’, a marker of shared working-class culture and taste; but if you sided with the bourgeoisie – Jewish or not – you were the enemy of the movement.

The Bundists also discovered, through practice more than through theory, that class struggle alone could not erase national oppression. Teaching Marxism in Yiddish and organizing Jewish guilds and strikes, they experienced firsthand that Jewish workers were discriminated against even by socialist comrades, while Jewish employers exploited them as much as any other. As Bundist organizers bitterly noted, many Jewish employers even preferred to hire non-Jews, considering them ‘less troublesome’ laborers, which deepened both class and ethnic fractures (Brossat and Klingberg Reference Brossat, Klingberg and Fernbach2016).

This hard-earned realization pushed Bundists toward convergence with Austro-Marxists like Renner: they defended nonterritorial cultural rights not only for Jews but also for all minorities in the empire, articulating a distinctly socialist case for NTA well before Lenin’s reluctant concessions. Tobias (Reference Tobias1972) and Quiroga and Massó (Reference Quiroga and Massó2017) show how Bundist theorists, including Vladimir Medem, recognized their proximity to Austro-Marxism, even while remaining rooted in the Russian revolutionary context.

The Bund’s solution – class struggle plus nonterritorial autonomy – placed it at odds with both Bolsheviks and Zionists.Footnote ³ Lenin, who sparred tactically and strategically with Bundist leaders, denounced such autonomies as a threat to revolutionary unity, fearing they would fragment the movement (Gechtman Reference Gechtman2016). Zionists dismissed the Bund as parochial, unwilling to embrace a transnational Jewish destiny. And yet the Bund insisted that Jews were not a metaphysical or racial nation but a cultural nation, bound by language and daily life.

The Bund was eventually crushed – first marginalized by Bolsheviks, then annihilated by Nazis. Yet its legacy survives. As Tucker (Reference Tucker, Tucker and de Bellis2016) emphasizes, Bundist proposals for cultural autonomy remain relevant wherever multiethnic coexistence requires nonterritorial solutions. Tobias (Reference Tobias1972) and Quiroga and Massó (Reference Quiroga and Massó2017) further show how Bundist theory influenced socialist debates across Eastern Europe, often in parallel with Austro-Marxist thought.

Taken together, these genealogies show that unterritorial democracy is neither eccentric nor new. It has been theorized in utopian pamphlets, debated in socialist congresses and defended in the streets of Warsaw and Vilna. In the 21st century, digital infrastructures of coordination and plural identities render these precedents less a relic of the past than a living resource for democratic imagination. These traditions need not be reconciled in a single design; their tension is itself instructive.

The three lineages discussed earlier do not converge on a single model of political organization. Rather, they illuminate two distinct axes of unterritorial imagination. The Austro-Marxist and Bundist traditions demonstrate portability within the territorial state – forms of cultural self-rule that remain nested in a broader public authority. The panarchist current, by contrast, radicalizes voluntariness beyond the state, imagining governance as a mosaic of overlapping associations. Unterritorial democracy should therefore not be read as a synthesis but as a mediating framework between these poles: it extends the logic of cultural autonomy toward voluntary association while retaining the accountability and legal anchoring that made the former politically viable. English pluralists – such as Figgis, Laski and Cole – anticipated precisely this mediation, treating associations as self-governing yet publicly answerable entities. Their vision was later systematized by David Nicholls (The Pluralist State, Reference Nicholls1975) and revived in Paul Hirst’s Associative Democracy (Reference Hirst1994), and further developed by Avigail Eisenberg in Reconstructing Political Pluralism (Reference Eisenberg1995), all of whom emphasized that democratic vitality depends on dispersed, overlapping and accountable forms of authority. In that sense, unterritorial democracy is best conceived not as a replacement of territorial orders, but as a polycentric complement that bridges the feasible with the imaginable.

If these genealogies establish the intellectual roots of unterritorial democracy, the next step is to consider its institutional branches. Ideas alone do not sustain political life; they require organizational forms and rules of interaction. From the Bund’s cultural councils to Renner’s legal blueprints and De Puydt’s radical thought experiment, each precedent implied concrete arrangements for how people could belong, participate and resolve conflicts. Building on this legacy, the next section examines what unterritorial institutions might look like in practice – their competences, membership rules, mechanisms of accountability and strategies for conflict resolution.

Designs and practices of unterritorial democracy

The designs and practices of unterritorial democracy shift the discussion from genealogy to institutional architecture. This section sketches how such polities might be organized in practice – what competences they could exercise, how membership might function and how they could coexist with territorial states. The subsections that follow unpack these dimensions in greater detail, moving from design principles to historical analogies.

Life under panarchy: everyday practices and tensions

What would it actually feel like to live under unterritorial democracy? Beyond institutions and precedents, this section imagines everyday scenarios: a global professional, a dispersed indigenous voter, a migrant worker and a religious minority. Each vignette illustrates not only the emancipatory promise of portable belonging, but also the tensions that arise when overlapping communities collide. In this way, we can glimpse both the promise and the perils of panarchic life.

Imagine waking up in a world where your political community is not defined by the street you live on, but by the associations you choose. You check your phone: three notifications await. One is from your professional guild, reminding you of an upcoming vote on new teaching standards. Another is from your cultural council, which has just approved funding for diaspora schools. A third is from your labor cooperative, asking members worldwide to ratify a new health insurance scheme. None of these authorities depend on your current address in Santiago, Moscow or Jakarta – they follow you, as portable as your email account or your bank card. Citizenship, in this world, is less a matter of soil and more a matter of solidarity.

From here, the scenarios that follow – of a global professional, a dispersed indigenous community, an economic migrant and a religious minority – illustrate both the promise and the peril of unterritorial democracy. They show how panarchic affiliation could make political life more portable and plural, but also how such affiliations inevitably clash, creating zones of tension where rights, duties and identities overlap.

Challenges and research agenda

The preceding sections illustrated how unterritorial democracy might work in practice, drawing on historical precedents, proto-examples and imagined scenarios. Yet, any such proposal must also confront its normative vulnerabilities and analytical blind spots. This final section therefore identifies key challenges, sketches a research agenda to evaluate them systematically and concludes by situating unterritorial democracy within broader debates on democratic renewal.

Conclusion: rethinking democracy beyond territory

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed with brutal clarity both the fragility and the adaptability of democracy. It showed that political belonging remains stubbornly territorial even as daily life, work and solidarity increasingly transcend borders. This stress test is not the starting point of the argument but its confirmation: if democracy is to match the portability of 21st century lives, it must therefore be reimagined within a framework of multiterritorial pluralism, where maps no longer confine the demos.

This essay has suggested a different horizon. Drawing on panarchist visions (De Puydt, Nettlau, Zube, Rozeff), Austro-Marxist debates (Renner, Bauer) and Bundist experiments with nonterritorial autonomy, I have argued that democracy need not be confined to maps. It can be imagined as unterritorial: voluntary, overlapping, portable communities of belonging that travel with persons rather than being chained to places. This resonates with Jefferson’s assertion in the Declaration of Independence (1776) that governments derive their ‘just powers from the consent of the governed’ – a consent that need not be territorially confined.

Of course, this horizon is fraught with dilemmas. Equity, accountability and interdependence will not resolve themselves. Critics warn of inequalities, externalities or segregation. Yet, history reminds us that what once seemed utopian – universal suffrage, women’s rights, direct elections – eventually became mundane. The question our century must face is: why should democratic consent remain territorially confined?

Kant ([Reference Kant1795] Reference Kant1972) envisioned a federation of republics that might secure ‘perpetual peace’, but his imagination stopped at borders. Madison (Madison Reference Madison and Rossiter1788 [Reference Madison and Rossiter1961]) defended checks and balances as the safeguard of liberty, yet only within a territorial architecture. Unterritorial democracy challenges us to extend such safeguards into plural, overlapping polities. Macrotheories of the state also underscore the contingency of our current order: Weber (Reference Weber, Roth and Wittich1978) defined the state by its territorial monopoly of legitimate violence; Tilly (Reference Tilly1990) showed that this form crystallized through war-making and extraction rather than democratic choice; Schumpeter (Reference Schumpeter1942) reduced democracy to a competition for votes within that territorial frame; and Dahl (Reference Dahl1989) described polyarchy as the institutionalization of uncertainty within bounded states. Unterritorial democracy unsettles each of these premises: it diffuses Weber’s monopoly, disrupts Tilly’s territorial logic, stretches Schumpeter’s competition across voluntary communities and extends Dahl’s uncertainty into overlapping and portable polities.

This essay therefore contributes in two ways: first, by theorizing unterritorial democracy as an alternative architecture of belonging that multiplies rather than abolishes polities; and second, by developing criteria and precedents that render such designs both historically grounded and normatively urgent. Unlike cosmopolitan democracy (Held Reference Held1995; Archibugi Reference Archibugi2008), which imagines a single universal demos, unterritorial democracy emphasizes plural and overlapping communities that individuals can enter, exit and combine.

Before closing, it is worth recalling that this essay has been both analytical and normative: analytical in systematizing dispersed legal and political innovations that already erode the monopoly of territorial citizenship; normative in articulating the conditions under which those innovations could enhance rather than weaken democratic accountability. Its ambition is not to prescribe a blueprint but to offer a vocabulary for designing unterritorial institutions that remain publicly answerable across scales. Seen in this light, the argument belongs to the reflexive current of global constitutionalism, which links descriptive inquiry with constitutional imagination.

Unterritorial democracy is not a fantasy but a provocation. It invites us to rethink the demos itself: to design institutions that follow persons, not places. If democracy is, as Diamond (Reference Diamond2021) notes, vulnerable to regression in its current forms, perhaps its renewal lies not only in defending the state but in reimagining political belonging.Footnote ⁶ Another world is possible – not by abolishing borders, but by refusing to let them define the limits of democratic consent. As Delanty (Reference Delanty2009) argues, the cosmopolitan imagination lies in the capacity to envision new forms of belonging beyond the nation–state. Unterritorial democracy can be read as one such imagination made institutional: a design for portable, overlapping polities that transform the way we conceive democratic consent. In this sense, it aligns with and extends the research program of Global Constitutionalism, which seeks to understand how rights, the rule of law and democratic legitimacy can be preserved and expanded when authority transcends the state. Unterritorial democracy does not replace territorial constitutionalism but adds a complementary horizon, foregrounding person-linked belonging as a category of constitutional analysis. Methodologically, the article proposes person-linked indicators as a complement to state-centric metrics, aligning measurement with the field’s concern for authority that travels across and beyond states.

The pandemic ultimately exposed the mismatch between portable lives and fixed memberships. It revealed that societies can adapt work, communication and solidarity across borders with striking speed, yet political belonging remains stubbornly territorial. For global constitutionalism, the challenge of the 21st century is therefore to close that gap: to design democracies that are as portable, resilient and accountable as the people they claim to serve. Such democracies are not beyond territory but interwoven across multiple territorial scales, global, national, local and associative, each reinforcing the others.