Challenging State Legitimacy: State Deniers in Liberal Democracy

In recent years, and especially since the Covid pandemic, the phenomenon of “state denialism” has attracted numerous followers and raised public attention. It has gained substantial support in Western states and been critically observed by the media and public discourse. While the phenomenon is as heterogenous as the terms used to describe it – Reichsbürger (citizens of the Reich), Selbstverwalter (self-governors), Staatsverweigerer (state deniers), autonomen (the autonomous), sovereign citizens, and so on – it can be broadly defined as follows: State deniers are groups and individuals who for various motives and on various grounds – e.g. by referring to national history, conspiracy theories or the law of nature – reject the existence of the state and its legal system, deny the legitimacy of its democratically elected representatives or claim that the legal order does not apply to them (Goertz 2023). In short, they challenge the legitimacy of the liberal democratic state. While most of the existing literature addresses the phenomenon as a security threat through the lens of terrorism, criminology or psychology (Speit 2017; Keil 2021; Goertz 2023), this research approaches the phenomenon from social scientific, socio-legal and normative perspectives. It seeks to address the who, how and why of state denialism. It studies, first, who the state deniers are. Second, it examines how they manifest their ideologies, how they put them into practice and how, in this process, they contest the liberal democratic state, the law and its symbolic and material order. Third, the paper works out the normative arguments and underpinnings of state denialism in light of different political philosophies and the sociology of law. It inquires how state deniers question the legitimacy of the state and how, in reaction, the state legitimizes itself. Based on the methodology of grounded normative theory, the paper consists of qualitative social science and empirically engaged political theory. It examines the role of nativism, gender and class in state denialism. Epistemologically, the paper seeks to study the margins of the state (Das and Poole 2004) and to turn around the telescope (Hadj Abdou 2019) by exploring how the state claims legitimacy when faced with state deniers. Methodologically, the paper analyses the legal framework, official documents and jurisprudence, public and media discourse as well as data from ethnographic fieldwork (interviews and observations) in two national contexts, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Ultimately, the paper researches how liberal democracy successfully claims legitimacy – against state deniers but also, more importantly, in light of broader contestations. State deniers can be understood as a challenge to the liberal democratic order, as an agon (Honig 2023) within liberal democracy. The study of how state deniers are perceived, produced and sanctioned by the state thus offers valuable insights into how liberal democracy treats its “others” and (successfully) claims legitimacy. The findings of this research therefore contribute to both the academic and the political debate on state deniers and how, beyond the state’s monopoly on the use of force, to counter them democratically.