The Decoupling Sovereignty Index: The Anatomy of Becoming Nobody – Port-au-Prince, Catatumbo and Zamfara

Conventional state-failure indices treat the country as the unit of analysis and sovereignty as a binary or a rank, obscuring the everyday experience of those who live under thinning authority. Building on the Trinity of Sovereignty Decay (TSD) theory, this paper proposes the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a zone-level instrument designed to measure the gap between a state’s formal legal authority and its effective, lived reach; the DSI was first outlined publicly in a syndicated column. Using documentary evidence from three zones—Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Catatumbo (Colombia), and Zamfara (Nigeria)—it identifies three configurations of decoupling: contested, competing, and negotiated sovereignty. Across these cases, the paper traces three disappearances—protection, legibility, and representation—through which individuals remain legally recognised but become institutionally invisible, a condition termed “becoming nobody.” Rather than waiting for the language of collapse, the DSI enables earlier detection of decoupling by focusing on where, how, and to what degree sovereignty reaches the individual. The paper argues that the zone, not the state, is the more revealing unit for understanding contemporary sovereignty decay, and it sets out the conceptual anatomy that later operational work will formalise. The DSI’s technical specification is documented separately.