By Francisco Albanese
A pan-anarchist or pan-secessionist politics begins from an intuition that is difficult to separate from the libertarian tradition: the greater the concentration of power in a single institution, the greater that institution’s capacity to impose decisions upon populations that do not want them. Hence the preference for small jurisdictions, voluntary associations, local autonomy, and the right of exit. Taken to its logical conclusion, the same reasoning should extend to coercive power. It would be strange to denounce the state monopoly on force for centuries and then become alarmed precisely when certain technologies begin to erode it. Yet the process now unfolding offers no guarantee of a freer world. The dispersion of the capacity to exercise violence may benefit a community seeking to protect its independence, but it may equally benefit those seeking to dominate it; it may reduce the advantage enjoyed by Washington, Brussels, or Beijing while increasing that of an armed religious organization, a criminal network, or a revolutionary structure that would never recognize the autonomy of its neighbors. This is the difficulty that the older secessionist imagination could not foresee in its full magnitude. For a long time, the problem seemed to consist in escaping Leviathan. It is now becoming necessary to consider what happens when Leviathan ceases to be the only dangerous animal in the territory.
Pan-secession implies something more demanding than simple administrative fragmentation. Its promise rests on the possibility that communities holding incompatible conceptions of life might cease struggling over the same political center and organize themselves separately. One city might be socialist, another libertarian; one region might preserve traditional institutions while another constructs a radically individualist society. The underlying agreement would not be shared values, but the acceptance that disagreement does not automatically confer a right of conquest. In this sense, generalized secession requires a minimum degree of reciprocity: the freedom to separate only works if those who separate also recognize the separation of others. The disappearance of the central state does not solve this problem by itself. It may even make it more urgent, because it removes the arbiter that had previously—well or badly, justly or unjustly—set the boundaries of conflict. An archipelago of autonomous communities may be politically decentralized, yet it will still inhabit a world in which material power exists. Once violence ceases to be extraordinarily expensive, that geography of small sovereignties acquires a vulnerability that theories centered merely on the right of exit tend to treat inadequately.
The history of weapons offers an uncomfortable precedent. Patrick Fitzsimmons’s argument turns precisely on the relationship between military technology and political concentration. Bronze favored structures capable of sustaining long and expensive trade networks because the tin required to produce it had to travel considerable distances. Iron altered that balance. Its abundance made it possible to produce weapons much closer to where they would be used, reducing the advantage that large political centers derived from controlling scarce resources. The political consequence was not merely a technical improvement: peripheral communities could equip themselves with means of violence comparable to those available to imperial centers. Fitzsimmons interprets this transition, in essence, as a democratization of violence and finds a contemporary parallel in drones, whose low cost allows them to threaten equipment, positions, and infrastructure requiring incomparably greater investment (Fitzsimmons, 2026). The decisive point is that iron did not ask about the ideology of the person forging it, just as a modified commercial drone does not distinguish between a defensive militia and an expansionist organization. Technology changes the distribution of power before philosophy has any chance to decide what should be done with it.
This fits within a broader transformation of warfare that was already visible before the proliferation of inexpensive drones. Fourth-generation warfare described a landscape in which the state ceased to be the exclusive subject of armed conflict. The boundaries between war and peace, front and rear, combatant and civilian population began to lose their clarity, while political, economic, and social networks became as important as military formations. In Hammes’s formulation, victory for a fourth-generation force depends less on physically destroying the enemy army than on eroding the will required to continue an expensive political undertaking. A materially inferior organization may survive for years, shift the conflict onto the psychological plane, and exploit the disparity between what it costs to maintain a state apparatus and what it costs to harass it (Hammes, 2004). The original framework developed by Lind and his collaborators had already identified this erosion of the state monopoly as one of the fundamental changes in contemporary warfare (Lind et al., 1989). From an anti-state perspective, there is something inevitably attractive about this transformation: the giant is no longer invulnerable. Yet precisely for that reason it is no longer obvious who will occupy the space abandoned by the giant.
The wars of recent decades have shown that a decentralized force need not be libertarian, tolerant, or even particularly localist. Jihadist organizations have learned to combine rigid ideological structures with flexible operational methods, small cells, distributed propaganda, fragmented financing, and an extraordinary capacity to preserve knowledge after losing territory. Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq also functioned as enormous practical schools for fighters who moved between conflicts, transmitted experience, and adapted civilian technologies to military use. The territorial defeat of an organization may destroy its administration without eliminating the human networks that accumulated knowledge of communications, recruitment, surveillance, propaganda, or drone employment. That experience can migrate, merge into another organization, or reappear years later in a different theater. This creates a particularly serious asymmetry for any pan-secessionist project. A small community must preserve infrastructure, population, and territorial continuity; a distributed insurgent network can afford to lose nodes so long as enough relationships survive for it to rebuild. The territorial actor defends something visible. The distributed actor, by contrast, can turn the absence of territory into an advantage. The old image of small free cities protected by sheer distance from the center becomes far less convincing when the potential enemy does not need a center either.
The same transformation explains why the movement from fourth- toward fifth-generation warfare—or, more precisely, toward the fifth gradient—should not be understood as a simple technological escalation. The xGW framework gradually abandoned the assumption that each form of war chronologically replaces the one before it. Different gradients may coexist, overlap, and even descend toward more openly kinetic forms when circumstances require it. At the higher gradients, physical force loses relative importance compared with manipulation of context, perception, attribution, and behavior. Abbott (2010) gathered under the discussion of 5GW a series of approaches in which influencing actors, networks, and institutions may prove more decisive than destroying them. The fifth gradient acts upon the ability to observe and interpret, to the point that an adversary may not know who is acting against it, or even whether certain events form part of a deliberate conflict at all (Krishnan, 2024). An order composed of many small sovereign units would present an especially complex surface in this environment.
Imagine a system of twenty or thirty neighboring communities with very different religious, economic, and cultural orientations. Some would trade extensively with one another; others would have territorial, migratory, or environmental disputes; some would depend on infrastructure crossing neighboring jurisdictions. In a conventional war, aggression is relatively easy to identify: a military column crosses a border and an identifiable enemy appears. Under higher forms of conflict, pressure can take much less obvious forms. A rumor campaign can deteriorate relations between two communities. A sabotage operation falsely attributed to a neighbor can alter alliances. An external organization can simultaneously finance opposing factions, encourage incidents designed to provoke retaliation, or exploit an economic crisis to intensify polarization. None of this requires direct territorial control. The greater the internal diversity of the political archipelago, the greater the number of fault lines available for manipulation. Pluralism, which is its principal strength, also becomes an attack surface. The fifth gradient therefore introduces a severe irony: a society may preserve all of its autonomous institutions formally while progressively losing the capacity to determine which problems are genuinely its own, which have been induced, and who actually benefits from its responses.
It would be inconsistent to answer this situation simply by demanding a new state concentration of weapons. If the anarchist critique of the coercive monopoly has any substance, then the emergence of technologies capable of reducing the gap between large and small actors must at least be received as an ambivalent transformation rather than as an accident to be reversed. A drone costing a few hundred dollars that can endanger equipment worth vastly more changes the cost of entry into conflict in much the same way that abundant iron reduced an old imperial advantage. The political difficulty is that the material dispersion of power does not bring with it an equivalent dispersion of prudence. Markets may make sensors, communications, and unmanned platforms cheaper; they cannot ensure that users will respect anyone else’s right to autonomy. Pan-anarchism therefore has to accept two propositions that sit uneasily together: the decentralization of defensive capacity is consistent with its critique of the state, and that same decentralization increases the number of actors capable of destroying a decentralized order.
This forces a reconsideration of what pan-secessionist defense would actually mean. The absolute autonomy of each unit, carried to its military extreme, would produce small jurisdictions forced to replicate separately the functions of intelligence, early warning, infrastructure defense, and response to threats that would rarely respect their borders. Such duplication would be expensive and, for many communities, impossible. The alternative would involve some degree of defensive cooperation without converting that cooperation into a new superior sovereignty. The distinction matters. A centralized military federation might gradually reconstruct the very structure from which the communities had separated; a network of defensive pacts, limited interoperability, information sharing, and arbitration would better preserve plurality, though it would still carry the problem of who decides when aggression has occurred and what response is legitimate. In fourth-gradient warfare, where the adversary may be dispersed, attribution is already difficult. In the fifth it can become the central problem. A libertarian defensive architecture would have to learn how to share capacity without necessarily sharing sovereignty, and how to build trust without demanding political homogeneity.
The hardest question, however, remains outside technology. Pan-secession assumes that separation can replace conquest as the answer to irreconcilable differences. But that rule can stabilize only among actors willing to accept some degree of reciprocity. Nothing compels a millenarian, imperial, revolutionary, or religious organization to regard the indefinite existence of communities it considers corrupt or hostile as legitimate. Nor is there any reason to assume that every group will treat secession as an end state; some may regard autonomy merely as an interval during which power can be accumulated. The proliferation of accessible weapons lowers the cost of pursuing such strategies. Fourth-generation warfare provides ways to wear down a stronger adversary without confronting it directly; fifth-gradient warfare adds the possibility of disorganizing that adversary before it clearly understands who is acting. A pan-secessionist society therefore cannot rest on the expectation that territorial fragmentation will automatically pacify differences. Separation removes some causes of conflict and creates others. And the lower the technological cost of coercion becomes, the more important the political culture governing the use of that capacity becomes.
The decentralization of violence should be good news for anarchism in the same sense that the decentralization of information, production, or exchange usually is: it weakens centers that were previously able to impose conditions with little competition. But it would be a mistake to turn that affinity into a theology of technological progress. The same tools that allow a small community to make its conquest prohibitively expensive also allow a small hostile actor to harass it indefinitely. The future may resemble a great war between states less than an irregular landscape of partial sovereignties, armed networks, autonomous communities, private companies, religious organizations, and groups capable of exercising violence without formally governing territory. Technology may help dismantle the state without producing the society anarchists expected to find behind it. The pan-secessionist challenge, then, is harder than merely fragmenting power: it is to create an order in which the dispersion of power does not become an unlimited dispersion of predation. The age of decentralized weapons may greatly enlarge the space available for autonomy. It may also demonstrate that escaping the center was only the first part of the problem.
References
Abbott, D. H. (Ed.). (2010). The handbook of 5GW: A fifth generation of warfare? Nimble Books.
Fitzsimmons, P. (2026, September 23). Weapons of mass decentralization. Works in Progress.
Hammes, T. X. (2004). The sling and the stone: On war in the 21st century. Zenith Press.
Krishnan, A. (2024). Fifth generation warfare: Dominating the human domain. Routledge.
Lind, W. S., Nightengale, K., Schmitt, J. F., Sutton, J. W., & Wilson, G. I. (1989). The changing face of war: Into the fourth generation. Marine Corps Gazette, 73(10), 22–26.
