Sovereignism as Privilege: Sovereign Citizens and State Response

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 state deniers, citizens of the Reich, self-governing citizens, sovereign citizens, or freemen. This designation is usually an external ascription and only in some cases self-ascribed. 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 and thus also of democracy and the legal system. This article 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 article 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: privileged positionalities (e.g. race, class, gender), privileged state presence/absence, privileged state response, privileged utopias. In conclusion, the paper discusses what an understanding of sovereignism as privilege entails for the sociological analysis and the political debate on the phenomenon.