Constitutionalism beyond territory: Unterritorial democracy, panarchy and pan-citizenship

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility and adaptability of democratic orders. While confinement accelerated cross-border ‘tele-life’, rights and protections remained territorially locked. This essay argues that democracy need not be tied to the Westphalian state: it can be re-imagined as unterritorial democracy – voluntary, overlapping and portable communities of belonging. Building on panarchist thought, Austro-Marxist proposals for non-territorial autonomy and Jewish Bundist experiments with cultural self-rule, I advance a model of pan-citizenship and polycentric governance in which rights and representation follow persons rather than places. The contribution is threefold: (1) a genealogy that situates unterritorial democracy within longer traditions of political imagination; (2) analytical criteria – membership portability, competence clarity, equity and accountability – that render such institutions evaluable; and (3) contemporary proto-examples – from diaspora voting to indigenous electoral registers – showing that elements of unterritorial democracy already exist. By integrating historical, analytical and empirical strands – and by engaging debates on emergency powers and derogations of rights – the essay positions unterritorial democracy as a normative horizon for global constitutionalism, inviting person-linked indicators capable of capturing democratic belonging within a framework of multiterritorial pluralism. In this way, the essay contributes to both the normative debates and the methodological agenda of global constitutionalism.