Legitimizing land grabs in a digital age

Riding and Dahlman’s (2022) appeal to the collective responsibility of geographers to ‘write anti-imperial accounts and to rethink traditional ways in which to write of disputed territories’ provides the entry point for my intervention. The authors creatively think through their own responsibility to counter the land grab of the right-libertarian state of Liberland by constructing a cyber-spatial montage of this contested landscape. Splicing the virtual reality of Liberland onto this more-than-human terrain, they present a ‘tonality of fragments’ (Riding, 2021: 143) comprising differentially situated humans and other taxa.

As a strategy for making sense of complex environments, montage has been applied elsewhere to show how simultaneous trajectories of power asymmetries (re)pattern cultural stereotypes along class, racial, and gendered lines (Pred, 1995). These demographic tensions are conspicuously lacking from this particular racialized (white) Balkans imaginary, despite its setting within a contested Croatian-Serbian borderland. As Riding and Dahlman rightly point out, however, the processes of social dispossession and displacement that usually characterize modern land grabs do not feature in Liberland, which has no permanent human population and exists more as a cyber-nation that relieves its citizens of the obligation to take up physical residency by affording them e-residency.

In terms of its remoteness, however, Liberland bears similar characteristics to other land grabs in undeveloped borderlands and resource frontiers ripe for exploitation and neocolonialism by outside investors (Zoomers and Otsuki, 2017). Far removed from the public scrutiny of urban-based environmental and rights movements, privatized land acquisitions in borderland spaces represent the acute expression at the periphery of capital-driven development agendas that exclude local interests while obscuring the major perpetrators of environmental harm (Miller, 2021). Liberland's founders have not yet built their planned airship port, main street, and other national infrastructures, but their claims to sovereignty encroach upon an unpeopled wetland ecosystem teaming with wildlife that only awaits conversion from ownerless (res nullius) property into private property under the libertarian state model.

Borderlands that at first glance appear to be empty wastelands or neglected spaces on the margins of sovereign state control tend to subsequently reveal complex assemblages of overlapping or competing governance systems. Despite their physical distance from centers of political and economic power, borderlands may thus be integral components of broader national geographic imaginaries. Liberland is not an imagined exception to this general rule as its claim to terra nullius rests on the site of an ongoing border dispute between Serbia and Croatia that respectively dismiss its territorial claim as a ‘frivolous act’ and ‘a joke’ (Lewis-Kraus, 2015). Here, Riding and Dahlman's treatment of the concept of terra nullius is slippery, oscillating between ‘a colonial spatial imaginary’, a ‘legal fiction in international law’, and an ‘inhuman geography’. While colonial abuses of the terra nullius doctrine have been well documented (Sen, 2017), it is neither legally fictitious nor an inhuman construction. The adaptation of terra nullius from Roman property law by the 17th century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1916) in his Mare Liberum (The Freedom of the Seas, 1608) provides the basis for converting nature into property under modern international law (Price, 2017). For Riding and Dahlman, the ‘inhuman’, which they loosely define as ‘techne, and the racialized Other’, is perpetuated through the negative social consequences of terra nullius that displace and dispossess original inhabitants from their homelands, livelihoods, and ways of life. The authors’ delinking of human actions from inhuman geographies has the unsettling effect of downplaying or decentering human responsibility, as does their call for the enactment of ‘more-than-human geographies of responsibility’ against imperialist imaginaries that underpin and give shape to geographical articulations of terra nullius.

This obfuscation of human responsibility is my main contention with Riding and Dahlman's suggestion that the land grab of Liberland is, or could be, a more-than-human enterprise. Their portrayal of the self-proclaimed country as a ‘hybrid human-nonhuman socio-natural hydro-region’ offers few clues about the asymmetrical power relations between its invested and impacted stakeholders. The concept of hybridity is heuristically useful in examining the dispersed institutions and actors involved in governing transboundary resources such as migratory species, water, and air. It also lends important insights into the human relationships that animate across jurisdictions and property regimes around particular resources to produce new situationally specific practices, norms, and cultures (Miller et al., 2020). Liberland falls within both of these discrete spatial categories due to its location inside a transboundary nature reserve that is co-governed by five countries. It is co-governed in such a way as to deliberately maintain its borderland isolation in the service of protecting local biodiversity from human population. I was surprised Riding and Dahlman placed so little emphasis on the hybrid interactions between these transboundary environmental stewardship arrangements and Liberland's right-libertarian leadership. Surely ‘new cultural geography’ requires attention to ways in which these irreconcilable worldviews and different ideologies are used to justify and operationalize competing sets of land claims. If Liberland ‘reveals a cultural disregard for the “regional cultural landscape” of the western Balkans’, then what are the hybrid implications for this ‘unfinished compositional project’? Cultural formation is neither static nor immutable, but shifts over time as performative and representational activities change in response to (geo)political pressures and alliances, introducing new hybrid elements into countercultures and associated cultural identities.

Here, I confess to finding the hybridity of human–nonhuman relations in Liberland a little confusing. Riding and Dahlman suggest that the outlier state's social life extends to encompass ‘nonhuman inhabitants’, which they vaguely define as ‘the great outdoors’. In this relatively unpeopled landscape, human engagements with the great outdoors appear to be limited to field excursions to a difficult-to-access base camp and a deserted island, upon which, an abandoned windowless house provides the only infrastructure. How, then, should the ‘hydro-social’ realm of this regional cultural geography be understood in a landscape devoid of any permanent human population? Hydrosocial analyses treat water as socially embedded rather than in its molecular form of H₂O by interrogating water's redistributive effects within the power relations and institutions that shape its material flows (Linton, 2010). In a country that exists for practical purposes as a ‘cyber-nation’, it is difficult to ascertain how, or at which point, human–water connections become reciprocal and mutually reinforcing. For instance, I would have liked to have seen hydro-social analysis of the ways in which upstream dams constructed along the Danube River shape downstream social and environmental outcomes, a dynamic that is only hinted at but not fully explained.

The physical absence of humans inside Liberland's borders makes Riding and Dahlman's cyber-spatial montage especially relevant for exploring the socio-cartographic dimensions of this virtual land grab. Counter-cartographies have been deployed by Indigenous communities since the 1970s as a strategy of resistance against processes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003: 144) linked to large-scale land acquisitions. When applied as a tool to empower socially marginalized peoples, mapping technologies have proven useful in electronically demarcating and delineating lifeways that were once conveyed as mental images via the oral traditions of intergenerational knowledge systems (Olson et al., 2016). More broadly, transboundary environmental publics have enacted cyber-commons to attract distant support for both global and situated environmental agendas, albeit with mixed results (Miller, 2021). While Liberland represents the inverse of these de-territorialized online communities of environmental practice, it is no less politicized in its ambition to establish territorial control over a disputed borderland. Unlike Indigenous land rights claims, however, the imperial imaginary of Liberland cannot demonstrate any evidence of cultural, religious/spiritual, or livelihood continuity in human–nature relations to bolster its claim to international legitimacy. This raises further questions about how ‘more-than-human and more-than-representational aspects of territory’ can be meaningfully invoked in a political context in which citizens are disconnected from the very territory and resources upon which their claims to ownership are staked.

Besides challenging official borders and the legitimizing discourses associated with them, the internet is a powerful facilitator of fluid associational networks that bring people together around shared ideologies and collectively held grievances. These webs of interconnectivity can be harnessed to cultivate bonds of community by infusing diverse cultural elements into the construction of a cohesive group identity and sense of belonging within a cyber-community. The imagined community promoted by Liberland's founders makes full use of online spaces, both to exploit the ‘liminal uncertainty’ of the contested borderland to which they lay claim and to manufacture an ‘imagined citizenship’ within it. Riding and Dahlman's description of the outlier state's use of celebrity influencers and photo opportunities to enhance its media profile is fascinating in highlighting the chasm between the virtual and lived realities of citizenship and statehood. With place-making conducted entirely online, including through the establishment of government offices and roads that only exist on maps, the world's ‘first virtual platform state’ could exist on the moon, or ‘anywhere’. Indeed, as Riding and Dahlman explain, the location of Liberland was chosen ‘not for its ecology but its emptiness’.

What, then, should we call a self-proclaimed country that lacks not only a territorially bounded sovereign polity, but also any aspiration to conform to these conventional criteria for modern statehood? Doesn't embellishing a land grab by calling it a sovereign state afford the former undue legitimacy? Or, is the ‘virtual platform state’ an emergent phenomenon that poses a perceived (symbolic) or actual (legal) challenge to the sovereignty of nation-states? While I am not convinced that such an imagined community – which actively ‘preys upon depopulation’ – has a rightful place in scholarship on ethno-nationalism, it is worth briefly considering how other online nations navigate nationalism and cultural identity in virtual spaces without articulating the need to pursue citizenship in a separate sovereign state. Many traditional societies project their cultural heritage and national identities onto the internet in ways that remove the need to take up residency in particular places (Breslow and Allagui, 2012). These web-based platforms and networks invariably transform traditional identities from their original form into hybridized identities as they are rearticulated through layers of public and private exchanges and mediated through the differentiated experiences of their members. If online nations that are grounded in lived traditions and everyday cultural practices do not require sovereignty, then what basis does a nascent ‘nation’ with no offline history have for pursuing statehood?

‘Are white people actually still allowed to do this kind of thing in the 21st century?’, asked Bim Adewunmi (2014) when a Caucasian father from Virginia planted a flag in a disclaimed patch of desert on the Egypt-Sudan border so that he could coronate his daughter as a princess. This question resonated with my own reading of Liberland's founders, who originally considered declaring their new country in the same 800 square mile area of Sudanese-Egyptian desert that was subsequently claimed on behalf of seven-year-old Princess Emily from Virginia. Not only do terra nullius claims provide window dressing for land grabs, they also constitute an integral strategy of the land grab itself. Creating a set of assumptions about the uninhabited or deserted status of a particular landscape is a legitimizing device that bestows belonging onto an ‘ownerless’ entity. While I agree with Riding and Dahlman that we need to challenge (neo)imperialist histories and colonizing strategies, we must be careful to avoid inadvertently enhancing their leveraging power by redefining territorial disputes in ways that absolve the perpetrators of responsibility for their own actions. Virtual land grabs, as the new face of neocolonialism, are exclusively human inventions inflicted upon the more-than-human landscapes within which such acts take place.