What makes a nation legitimate? The social contract tradition — from Rousseau to Rawls — asks us to imagine consenting to the rules we live under. But did we? And does it matter that most legal systems ultimately justify themselves by pointing to... themselves? The law is valid because the law says it's valid. This circularity sits at the heart of how modern states claim authority, and it's rarely examined.
In this talk, we unpack these assumptions and asks a question that political philosophy has long treated as settled: is there a necessary connection between territory and statehood at all? From Westphalia to the present, we've taken it as given that a nation must control land. But in an era of global digital infrastructure, manufactured consent, and citizens who share more with strangers online than with their neighbours, that link deserves to be reopened.
Drawing on thinkers from Chomsky to Floridi, and informed by the author’s original work designing decentralized governance systems, this talk explores what happens when we start from first principles — taking human agency, reason, and verifiability as the moral ground state of collective organization, rather than geography or institutional authority.
If we were building nations today, what would we actually owe each other — and how would we prove it?
