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Stateless society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about a community lacking a government. For a nation lacking a state, see stateless nation. For the legal and social concept of not belonging to a recognised state, see Statelessness.

A stateless society is a society that is not governed by a state. In stateless societies, there is little concentration of authority; most positions of authority that do exist are very limited in power and are generally not permanently held positions; and social bodies that resolve disputes through predefined rules tend to be small.^[1] Stateless societies are highly variable in economic organization, and cultural practices.^[2]
While stateless societies were the norm in human prehistory, few stateless societies exist today; almost the entire global population resides within the jurisdiction of sovereign states. In some regions nominal state authorities may be very weak and wield little or no actual power. Over the course of history most stateless peoples have been integrated into the state-based societies around them.^[3]
Some political philosophies, particularly anarchism, regard the state as an unwelcome institution and consider stateless societies as an ideal.

Contents

• 1 Prehistoric peoples
• 2 As a political ideal
• 3 Social and economic organization
• 4 See also
• 5 References
• 6 Further reading

Prehistoric peoples

Map of the world in 1000 BCE color-coded by type of society. At this time, stateless societies were the norm.

  hunter-gatherers

  nomadic pastoralists

  simple farming societies

  complex farming societies/chiefdoms

  state societies

In archaeology, cultural anthropology and history, a stateless society denotes a less complex human community without a state, such as a tribal society, a clan, a band society or a chiefdom. The main criterion of "complexity" used is the extent to which a division of labor has occurred such that many people are permanently specialized in particular forms of production or other activity, and depend on others for goods and services through trade or sophisticated reciprocal obligations governed by custom and laws. An additional criterion is population size. The bigger the population, the more relationships have to be reckoned with.^{[citation needed]}
Evidence of the earliest known city-states has been found