I came at the project from two directions. The first was personal: I grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, which is full of weird little enclaves—the Geneva Freeport, the United Nations and its sister agencies, all the consulates and missions, and for a long time the Swiss banks—so I’ve always felt drawn to places with rules that don’t quite fit on the map. Then, in the aftermath of Trump and Brexit and Modi and Orban’s elections, I noticed that commentators were talking about “globalism” and “nationalism” in binary terms, which isn’t very accurate at all. It made me want to show that hard-to-place jurisdictions often serve as the missing link between these two ideologies, allowing them to co-exist more or less peacefully in matters of trade, diplomacy, taxation, immigration, even culture.

I briefly considered writing the book without once using the term “sovereignty” because it can mean so many things! But when politicians talk about “sovereignty”—or worse, “Westphalian sovereignty”—they’re typically referring to an ideal that only really makes sense in retrospect, as mythology. One land, one flag, one law, one people has globally never been the norm and probably never will be. Our world has always been much more complicated and interesting than that, and I hope that our understanding of it evolves to reflect that reality.

Outer space is such a good medium to think through how that might look in practice, because there can’t be territorial nation-states in space, but there can be state power, whether we’re talking about potential military operations or mining for natural resources. So how do you square that with one land, one law, one flag, one people when there’s no land, flag, binding law or even any people?

I would love to give you an unequivocal “yes” but I am ambivalent. On the one hand, I am all for challenging or just supplementing the structures of the nation-state with new, unusual, and plain different kinds of jurisdictions. I think there’s a way to do it right if the political will is there. We might imagine free zones for people, where anyone can just show up to and be safe from harm and able to make a living; or large-scale ecological zones that go beyond the national parks and protected areas we have today and, hopefully, be part of the solution to stop global warming. 

The problem is that the “alt” jurisdictions that exist today—special economic zones, flags of convenience, business courts, tax havens, offshore refugee processing centers, and so on—end up enabling more of the bad stuff, like making the rich richer, and less of the good stuff, which is making space for humanity (as opposed to business) to thrive.

But I do think it’s time to integrate these places into our worldview, both to challenge their negative impacts and build up more positive ones. Say what you will about capitalists, but the way they’ve carved out this space for themselves is incredibly clever. Certainly it won’t hurt if the political left takes a page from their book and starts to think more creatively about what’s possible.