Book review : Micronations and the search for sovereignty

Abstract

What makes a state, a state? This definitional question has generated a lot of debate among the SST community. By and large, we have tended to endorse subjective understandings and follow maxims like ‘we know a small state when we see one’, while at the same time employing practical cut-offs for the purpose of comparison (e.g. 1 million population). Such cut-offs have enabled researchers to distinguish between their cases and the work of scholars on ‘large’ states and territories. Micronations and the search for sovereignty forces us to look the other way: is there something smaller than a small state? And by smaller I do not mean microstates, a term often employed to differentiate countries with populations under 100,000, or even their semi-autonomous jurisdictions (e.g. Tobago, Barbuda, or Nevis in the Caribbean). [excerpt]