Beyond Rights: Building Belonging Outside the State

Introduction

Beyond rights activism begins with a heresy: what if the expansion of rights is not liberation but a refined method of control? For generations, movements have marched under the banner of inclusion, demanding that the circle widen. Let more people vote. Let more people marry. Let more people cross borders legally. Let more identities be recognized. Each victory feels righteous. Each reform seems humane.

Yet the circle itself remains intact.

Rights are granted by a sovereign power that decides who counts. Citizenship is the password to belonging. The state of exception lurks beneath the constitutional poetry, ready to suspend protections when fear spikes or crisis blooms. Camps, detention centers, deportations and the quiet violence of bureaucratic exclusion are not glitches. They are logical products of a system that must draw a line between inside and outside in order to exist.

If your movement limits itself to expanding rights within this framework, you risk reinforcing the authority that excludes in the first place. You become a better lobbyist for the gatekeeper rather than an architect of a new commons.

The task, then, is not simply to demand entry. It is to cultivate forms of belonging and safety that do not depend on citizenship or sovereign permission. This essay argues that movements must shift from rights expansion to sovereignty creation, from petitioning to prototyping, from static institutions to portable commons that scale through story and trust while evading co-option and repression.

The question is no longer how to win more rights. It is how to live as if belonging were not a government license but a shared practice.

The Limits of Rights-Based Activism

Rights-based activism has been the dominant script of modern democracy. It is persuasive, morally resonant and often effective at achieving reforms. But every tactic hides an implicit theory of change. The theory behind rights activism is simple: if the law recognizes us, we are safe.

History complicates this optimism.

Rights as Conditional Inclusion

Consider the arc of the civil rights movement in the United States. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act dismantled formal segregation. These were monumental victories. They shifted legal structures and opened public life to millions. Yet mass incarceration, voter suppression and economic apartheid persisted in new forms. The legal recognition of rights did not dissolve the deeper machinery of exclusion.

Rights are conditional. They rely on courts, enforcement agencies and political will. They can be narrowed by judicial reinterpretation. They can be suspended during emergencies. They are only as durable as the sovereign power that upholds them.

When crises erupt, the state declares exceptions. After 9/11, surveillance expanded dramatically. During pandemics, governments claimed extraordinary powers. In migration crises, detention camps proliferate. The language of rights remains, but its application bends under pressure.

If you anchor your movement solely in rights claims, you anchor it in a structure that can retract those rights when convenient.

The Expansion Trap

There is another limitation. Rights-based activism tends to frame democracy as an ever-expanding project. The story goes like this: first property-owning men, then all men, then women, then racial minorities, then sexual minorities, and so on. Democracy appears as a progressive conquest of new territory.

But this expansion presumes the legitimacy of the core structure. It assumes that the sovereign state is the natural container of belonging. It assumes that safety flows downward from law to citizen.

This narrative obscures the fact that the same system that grants rights also produces borders, prisons and categories of undeserving bodies. For every expansion, there is a new margin. The undocumented migrant, the stateless refugee, the incarcerated person, the future generation without representation. Someone must remain outside to define the inside.

Movements that focus exclusively on rights risk becoming managers of inclusion rather than challengers of the underlying architecture. They polish the surface while the foundation remains intact.

If you sense this tension in your organizing, you are not naïve. You are noticing the ceiling.

Sovereignty as the Real Terrain of Struggle

If rights are permissions, sovereignty is power. To move beyond rights-based activism, you must ask a more dangerous question: who decides?

Sovereignty is the authority to define rules, resolve conflicts and allocate resources. In modern political theory, sovereignty is monopolized by the state. The state decides who belongs, who is criminal, who can cross borders and who can be excluded in the name of security.

Movements often aim to influence sovereign decisions. They lobby, protest and pressure. Sometimes they win reforms. But the deeper transformation occurs when movements begin to exercise fragments of sovereignty themselves.

From Petition to Prototype

Occupy Wall Street provides a revealing case. The encampments did not center on a list of legislative demands. They created assemblies, kitchens, libraries and medical tents. For a brief season, parks became laboratories of self-governance. Participants experienced a different rhythm of decision making. They tasted collective power outside formal institutions.

The encampments were evicted. The experiment was short-lived. Yet the idea that ordinary people could govern space without state mediation spread globally. The tactic traveled faster than authorities could fully comprehend it.

The lesson is not to romanticize occupation. It is to recognize that sovereignty can be rehearsed.

When you establish a conflict resolution circle that replaces police intervention, you are practicing micro-sovereignty. When you create a cooperative treasury that allocates funds through participatory budgeting, you are exercising fiscal sovereignty. When you form a sanctuary network that shelters migrants regardless of status, you are redefining belonging.

These acts do not abolish the state. They expose its contingency.

Counting Sovereignty, Not Heads

Traditional activism measures success in turnout and media coverage. How many marched? How many signatures were collected? These metrics belong to a voluntarist lens that equates mass with power.

But in an era where even million-person marches can fail to halt war, size alone is insufficient. The global protests against the Iraq War in 2003 mobilized millions across continents. The invasion proceeded anyway. The spectacle of dissent did not convert into decision-making authority.

A more radical metric asks: how much sovereignty did you gain?

Did your campaign create an institution that can persist without state funding? Did it establish norms of care that operate independently of police? Did it shift who controls land, food, housing or digital infrastructure? Did it generate a parallel authority that people trust?

When you count sovereignty gained rather than bodies gathered, your strategy changes. You invest less in one-day spectacles and more in durable experiments of self-rule.

This shift prepares you for the next challenge: how to build alternatives that are concrete, scalable and resilient.

Portable Commons: Designing Scalable Belonging

The dream of radical alternatives often collapses under its own weight. Grand communes demand heroic commitment. Permanent occupations invite swift repression. Leaders burn out. Participants drift away.

To avoid romanticism and exhaustion, movements need designs that are portable, replicable and time-bound. Think in lunar cycles rather than eternal encampments. Strike, consolidate, dissolve, repeat.

The Logic of the Portable Commons

A portable commons is a temporary, community-driven gathering that provides real material support without demanding documentation or citizenship. It might be a four-hour pop-up kitchen in a park, a mobile childcare hub rotating between neighborhoods, or a conflict mediation circle hosted in borrowed space.

Key features distinguish it from charity or service provision.

First, participation replaces paperwork. No names required. Belonging is enacted through presence and contribution.

Second, transparency replaces hierarchy. Decisions about location, budget and focus are made in open assemblies or visible digital ledgers.

Third, mobility replaces permanence. The commons appears, fulfills its purpose and dissolves before bureaucratic inertia or repression can harden against it.

By remaining light and replicable, the portable commons scales sideways. When demand exceeds capacity, new cells replicate the model with local variations. There is no central brand to capture, no headquarters to raid.

Story as the Scaling Mechanism

How does such a project grow without conventional infrastructure? Through narrative.

Movements scale when their actions carry a believable story of change. The Quebec casseroles in 2012 offer a glimpse. Nightly pot-and-pan marches against tuition hikes required no central command. The sound traveled block by block. Households joined from balconies. The tactic was simple, repeatable and emotionally resonant.

Similarly, a portable commons becomes contagious when its story spreads faster than repression. Participants share art, songs and testimonies rather than data sets. The narrative is not about charity. It is about glimpsing a society where safety does not depend on citizenship status.

When people see that such a gathering is possible, they imagine hosting their own. The replication is cultural before it is organizational.

Resisting Co-option and Repression

Any successful experiment attracts attention. Institutions may attempt to absorb it. Politicians may offer grants with strings attached. Police may monitor or intimidate.

Design choices can mitigate these risks.

Short duration events reduce legal vulnerability. Rotating locations complicate surveillance. Decentralized decision making prevents charismatic capture. A minimal public-facing brand avoids becoming a logo to be appropriated.

Most importantly, the commons must deliver tangible value. Free meals, skill-sharing, childcare and conflict mediation create loyalty rooted in lived experience. When repression arrives, participants defend what they know works.

Repression can even catalyze growth if the story frames it correctly. When authorities overreact to modest acts of care, they reveal their own insecurity. The contrast sharpens public imagination.

Portable commons are not utopias. They are rehearsals. Their power lies in repetition and diffusion.

Trust, Sustainability and the Psychology of Belonging

Radical projects often fail not because of external repression but internal exhaustion. Organizers overextend. Conflicts fester. The initial euphoria fades.

Sustainability requires attention to psychology as much as logistics.

Build in Rhythms of Rest

Continuous mobilization drains will. Movements that refuse to pause eventually fracture. Designing projects in defined cycles protects energy. A four-hour commons that occurs once a week is easier to sustain than an indefinite occupation.

After each cycle, conduct a ritual of decompression. Share reflections. Celebrate small victories. Acknowledge tensions. This is not indulgence. It is strategic maintenance of collective morale.

Movements have half-lives. Once a tactic becomes predictable, authorities adapt. Innovation must be constant, but so must care.

Trust as the True Currency

If you are building belonging outside citizenship, trust becomes your primary infrastructure. Without legal contracts, you rely on reputation, transparency and shared norms.

Public ledgers of contributions, open assemblies and rotating facilitation roles can reinforce trust. When decisions are visible, co-option becomes obvious. When leadership circulates, power stagnation decreases.

Trust also grows through shared risk. When people cook together, resolve conflicts together and face mild repression together, bonds form that no policy change can replicate.

The goal is not to create a perfect micro-society. It is to create repeated experiences of solidarity that challenge the assumption that safety flows only from state authority.

Avoiding the Purity Trap

There is a temptation to frame these experiments as morally superior to all existing institutions. That path leads to isolation and burnout.

You operate in a world structured by states, markets and laws. Participants may still rely on government benefits, public schools and legal protections. The aim is not total withdrawal. It is partial autonomy.

By acknowledging this complexity, you avoid romanticism. Your project becomes a complement and a critique, not a fragile enclave demanding absolute allegiance.

This humility makes scaling easier. People can participate without renouncing their entire social reality.

Putting Theory Into Practice

Designing a portable, community-driven project requires intentional steps. Here is a practical blueprint to begin.

• Assemble a seed cell of nine people: Three focused on logistics, three on care work such as cooking or mediation, and three on storytelling and documentation. Keep the initial group small enough for trust and nimble decisions.

• Create a simple Commons Kit: A weatherproof trunk or set of containers holding essential tools such as a portable stove, first-aid supplies, printed guides on consent-based decision making and a blank ledger of gifts. The kit symbolizes continuity without central control.

• Define a strict time frame: Limit each gathering to a fixed duration, such as four hours. Announce the location shortly before the event through trusted channels. Mobility is your shield against bureaucratic capture.

• Establish a transparent contribution system: Use an open ledger or visible digital wallet where participants can contribute funds or resources. Allow anyone to propose the next location or theme, with decisions made in open assembly.

• Document through art, not data: Encourage participants to create murals, zines, songs or short testimonies that capture the spirit of the gathering. Avoid collecting personal information. Let story, not spreadsheets, be the engine of replication.

• Clone, do not centralize: When demand grows, support the creation of new Commons Kits in other neighborhoods. Share the basic design freely. Resist forming a rigid central authority.

Each step exemplifies belonging enacted through practice rather than granted by law. Each gathering is a micro-demonstration that community safety can emerge from mutual recognition.

Conclusion

Beyond rights activism does not dismiss the importance of legal reform. It recognizes its limits. Expanding rights can alleviate suffering. It can open doors. But it cannot resolve the fundamental logic of sovereignty that draws lines between worthy and unworthy lives.

If your movement seeks deeper transformation, you must supplement demands with prototypes. Build spaces where belonging is practiced without paperwork. Exercise fragments of sovereignty in kitchens, parks and borrowed rooms. Measure success not only in policies changed but in authority reclaimed.

Portable commons, rotating and replicable, offer one pathway. They embody a simple but radical claim: safety is not a license issued by the state but a relationship forged among people.

You do not need to abolish the state tomorrow to begin. You need to carve out moments where it becomes temporarily irrelevant.

The future of social change will not be won by bigger crowds alone. It will be won by communities that quietly learn how to govern themselves.

What would shift in your strategy if you measured progress by how often your movement makes the state unnecessary, even for a few hours?