The Sovereignty Stack Manifesto
I read somewhere that “demographics are destiny”. At the macro level, this is the notion that the characteristics of a population determine its future. If you zoom in, all the way to the personal level, to single individuals, you can say that where a person is born tends to have a direct correlation to their life prospects and outcomes.
It’s been more than a century since this axiom was said to have been coined1, and many things have changed since then. We live in an age where information, money and value move around the world in fractions of a second, and where geography is less and less a factor in the distribution of opportunity than it was a hundred years ago.
Yet, in this ostensibly flatter world, billions of people have an implicit ceiling on their potential, simply because of their citizenship, and how their country of birth stacks up in the global pecking order. If you’ve ever been denied a visa, prevented from buying and selling on the internet, or blocked from interacting with products, services and international business or finance infrastructure, because you were trying to do it from the “wrong” area code or IP address, then you know what it’s like to be a second-class citizen, physically and virtually. To put it mildly — it’s not great.
So, what to do?
Moving is an obvious way to improve one’s prospects. But less than four percent of the world’s population live in a place other than where they were born. This is because immigration — leaving everyone you know, and everything you’ve built behind, to start over from scratch in a foreign land, learn a new language, assimilate into a new culture, and altogether face very uncertain prospects — is hard. And apart from the fact that immigration is a rather fraught political football, most solutions that exist to make it less hard are generally targeted at the super rich.
After spending the past 4 years as a digital nomad, and corresponding with my friend Adim, who’s also been on a similar journey, we think we’ve come up with a pretty good, and democratic thesis about how people anywhere in the world can transcend the barriers to the global economy, and become global citizens, in ways that can be enabled by, but importantly are not limited to immigration.
The geo-economic tea leaves are constantly swirling. Countries and the gatekeepers to the global economy are always shifting goalposts across multiple regulatory variables. So, our global citizenship thesis is not a one-size-fits-all checklist. It happens to be based on all of the research we’ve done to improve our own personal prospects, corroborated by our lived experience as we have each navigated the world on Nigerian passports, and we think the general principles apply to just about anyone. But we also know that everyone’s circumstances and life priorities are different, and we’ve taken care to articulate a framework that can be adapted to unique, individual contexts.
Here’s what we think it boils down to: whether they are aware of it or not, everyone has something called a Sovereignty Stack2, which is comprised of their citizenship primarily, and other secondary statuses that determine how they interact with the physical and virtual world — what they can and cannot do, where they can and cannot go. By acquiring a curated combination of stat boosts — professional bona fides, visas, residence permits, corporate vehicles, bank accounts, addresses, second passports, and more — anyone with sufficient amounts of motivation, and grit to make a plan and see it through over a reasonable time horizon can upgrade their Sovereignty Stack They can go from the base build they were handed at birth, to a version that allows them to traverse and affect the physical and virtual worlds around them in exponentially more effective ways than would be possible if they accepted the default configuration.
I think that anyone, at any stage of their life, should be able to visualise the full spectrum of opportunity that is available to them at planet-scale, generate a unique roadmap tailored to their objectives, and take action with confidence and conviction towards making their dreams come true. The framework we’re articulating shows how an individual can upgrade their Sovereignty Stack, by procuring and equipping stat boosts that best support their preferred life outcomes. They can optimise for any number of things — increasing their global mobility, maximising their professional potential, exporting their skills and services to global markets, arranging their finances tax-efficiently, re-settling in a different country that better aligns with their values, or simply has their preferred climate and lifestyle options.
What for Adim and I started out as trading immigration tips and hacks in WhatsApp has evolved into a framework for proactive life design that we hope anyone can use — be they a bright-eyed high-school leaver with their whole life ahead of them, trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up, or a mature professional who wants to earn what they are worth, leave a legacy, and set their offspring up for success, or an entrepreneurial risk-taker, who wants to restack their deck and have a real shot at success in the global economy.
When we first got the idea to distill our experiences and thesis into a framework, we thought that the ideal format to distribute it would be a book. Over time, we’ve realised that it wants to be a book…and a bit more. Part of that is what this newsletter is. As we work to refine our thesis, we wanted to reach out to people around the world with similar experiences and pain points to test our assumptions, attempt to answer their questions, and overall ensure that we’re making something that helps them succeed and get ahead.
That’s where you come in. If you’ve made it this far, chances are good that all of this is of interest to you, and we’d love for you to participate. Please subscribe to get development updates, join our beta/early access reading cohort, or simply support the project.
If you’ve got thoughts or burning questions, send me a DM on Twitter or email me. I’d love to hear from you!
It is popularly attributed to 19th Century French philosopher, Auguste Comte.
We first encountered the term when Luis Cuende used it to describe their second passport product at a Network State conference in 2023.