Portable Sovereignty and the Right to Exit

The modern state operates on a fundamental rule where your physical location determines your

political destiny. This concept of territorial sovereignty is not natural law, but a specific European

inheritance from 1648 designed to tie authority to geography. The 14th-century

scholar Ibn Khaldun argued that political power is only truly constrained when people possess the

capacity to exit. Nomadic societies maintained freedom through mobility, while sedentary

populations became captive to the state because they could not move their assets. Modern governance

has effectively neutralized this check on power by making exit procedural rather than physical.

Through passports and borders, the state converts the natural right to leave into a