There is a community scattered among us with its own law, its own courts and its own well-armed militias […] They call their law, Common. (Koniak Reference Koniak1996: 65)
Introduction
When individuals invoke the system’s legal language while rejecting the authority it rests on, are they exposing the law’s contradictions, misreading it, or creating a legal order of their own? Across jurisdictions such as New Zealand, Germany, and Canada, individuals associated with so-called sovereign citizen formations claim that state law – whether in part or fully – does not apply to them, while simultaneously engaging it through dense and often hyper-legalistic argumentation (Babcock et al. Reference Babcock, Cohen and Gershon2025; De Boer Reference De Boer, Hertogh and de Winter2025; Fiebig and Koehler Reference Fiebig and Koehler2022; Gillespie Reference Gillespie2026; Kochi Reference Kochi2025; Löbbert Reference Löbbert2024; Sarteschi Reference Sarteschi2021). Although frequently described as a movement, this phenomenon is better understood as a heterogeneous milieu characterized by overlapping repertoires rather than coherent ideology (Cohen and Gershon Reference Cohen and Gershon2025; Sarteschi Reference Sarteschi2021; van Buuren Reference van Buuren2024).Footnote 1 No single, unified category fully captures what it means to be a sovereign citizen, and “one does not have to consider themselves a sovereign citizen to be a sovereign citizen” (Sarteschi Reference Sarteschi2021: 2; Reference Sarteschi, Hobbs, Young and McIntyre2025). Individuals associated with these formations have engaged in various acts of defiance, such as refusing to pay taxes (e.g., tax protesters in the United States), driving without valid licenses or registration, rejecting the authority of law enforcement, and engaging in other distinctive forms of (legal) resistance (Gillespie Reference Gillespie2026; Hobbs et al. Reference Hobbs, Young and McIntyre2024; Sarteschi Reference Sarteschi2021).
Yet despite the phenomenon’s resistance to easy classification, adherents characteristically reject the legitimacy of state law while simultaneously engaging it through dense, often hyper-legalistic argumentation. A central notion underpinning many of these worldviews is that “contemporary governments and states are illegitimate corporations whose law/s can be refused so that a supposedly original and radical individual sovereignty can be claimed” (Gillespie Reference Gillespie2026: 81; Cohen and Gershon Reference Cohen and Gershon2025). Rather than deriving from government, courts, or religious institutions, law is imagined as anchored in primordial laws or sovereign birthrights. These principles are seen as the true foundations of communities of free individuals, where ultimate authority is internal rather than external (van Buuren Reference van Buuren2024). Sovereignty, viewed through this lens, becomes humanity’s natural state of being, while those unaware of or denying this natural sovereignty are understood to live within what participants often describe as “The Fiction.”
This apparent paradox – rejecting state authority while intensively mobilizing legal language – poses a productive challenge for sociolegal analysis. Rather than dismissing such claims as misunderstanding or extremism, this article takes seriously how they are experienced as meaningful and, at times, coherent by those who articulate them (Koniak Reference Koniak1996; Löbbert Reference Löbbert2024). Doing so shifts the analytical focus from doctrinal validity to processes of meaning-making, recognizing that legal meaning is always constructed and contested (Halliday Reference Halliday2019; Hertogh Reference Hertogh2018).
Approaching the phenomenon through the lens of legal consciousness, this article asks how Dutch sovereign citizens construct and enact understandings of legality through narrative frameworks, and how sovereign legal claims are navigated in encounters with institutional authority.Footnote 2 While existing research has richly mapped the doctrinal content and textual circulation of pseudolegal claims (Hobbs et al. Reference Hobbs, Young and McIntyre2025), less attention has been paid to how these ideas are enacted in situated encounters with legal institutions and embedded in everyday meaning-making, and relatively few studies have examined how sovereign citizens relate to law itself in sociolegal terms (for exceptions see Fuchs and Kretschmann Reference Fuchs and Kretschmann2019; Löbbert Reference Löbbert2024). Although sociolegal scholarship has long explored how people live “in the shadow of” or “beyond” law (e.g., Bumiller Reference Bumiller1987; Merry Reference Merry1990), explicit challenges to the authority of state law remain comparatively underexplored. This gap is sharpened by the fact that sovereign citizen claims often extend beyond critique or resistance, advancing a counterclaim that their interpretation of law constitutes the only valid law, thereby stretching existing sociolegal vocabularies.
Empirically, the analysis focuses on the Netherlands, where sovereign citizen repertoires have gained visibility in recent years – their emergence coinciding with broader currents of institutional distrust and anti-system sentiment that intensified in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and related governance controversies (Hurenkamp Reference Hurenkamp2025; van Buuren Reference van Buuren2024). This setting offers a particularly instructive case: rather than emerging in a common law environment typically associated with rights-based or contractual reasoning, these narratives take shape within a highly bureaucratized welfare-state context in which legitimacy is often grounded in procedure, administration, and institutional rationality. Examining how transnational legal imaginaries are translated into this context allows for a more precise understanding of how alternative legalities are locally enacted while globally informed.
Analytically, the article approaches sovereign citizen narratives through two complementary lenses. Drawing on Robert Cover’s account (1983), it understands participants’ claims not merely as misinterpretations of law but as efforts at normative world-making that connect moral judgment and legal meaning. At the same time, building on Kathryne Young’s (Reference Young2014) relational account of legal consciousness, the analysis treats legitimacy not as fixed but as continually constituted through interactions with social and institutional environments, including actors’ expectations of how others understand, invoke, and respond to law. This article contributes to legal consciousness scholarship by conceptualizing sovereign citizen legality through what we call counter-nomic legal consciousness: a narrative and relational mode of legal meaning-making through which individuals contest state authority while remaining deeply invested in law’s language, procedures, and symbolic force. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA; Smith Reference Smith2017), the article draws on in-depth interviews with four participants and six courtroom observations to demonstrate how sovereign citizen understandings of legality do not amount to straightforward rejection of state law, but are sustained through the interplay between narrated legal understandings and situated negotiations of legal authority.
Sovereign citizen narratives in the Netherlands: a brief overview
In the Netherlands, sovereign citizen narratives have become more visible since the COVID-19 pandemic, even though related ideas circulated earlier and should not be treated as wholly new (van Buuren Reference van Buuren2016: 242, 261–262; De Boer Reference De Boer2024a; Van der Tak and Harambam Reference Van der Tak and Harambam2025). Their increased visibility is tied to the Dutch institutional setting in which courts, municipalities, tax authorities, and other public bodies have reported an increase in confrontations with citizens who deny the applicability or legitimacy of state authority in highly formalized, document-heavy ways (De Boer Reference De Boer2024a: 300–301; Geurtjens et al. Reference Geurtjens, van den Hurk, Lugtigheid, Bouma, Palmen and van Ostaaijen2024). The public turning point came in late 2023, when the President of the Dutch Supreme Court warned that the Court had received “nineteen moving boxes” of letters from persons claiming to place themselves outside the Dutch legal order, a signal that quickly reverberated through media, policy, and academia (De Boer Reference De Boer2024a: 300; Hurenkamp Reference Hurenkamp2025: 5–6; Van der Tak and Harambam Reference Van der Tak and Harambam2025).
Dutch sovereign citizens should not, however, be mistaken for a coherent movement. What emerges from the literature is a heterogeneous and only loosely connected milieu of self-styled sovereign citizens, linked less by durable organization than by overlapping narrative repertoires, forms of argumentation, and broadly similar activities (Siegel Reference Siegel2024: 203; Van der Tak and Harambam Reference Van der Tak and Harambam2025: 819–824). Even the term movement therefore requires caution (De Boer Reference De Boer2024b: 4). It may serve as shorthand, but it also risks exaggerating unity where adherents have been reported to disagree on how sovereignty should be attained, to display differing degrees of withdrawal from or confrontation with the state, and to vary in their degree of identification with labels such as “sovereign” (Van der Tak and Harambam Reference Van der Tak and Harambam2025: 819–821, 825, 841–844; De Boer Reference De Boer2024a; Reference De Boer2024b).
Despite this organizational fragmentation, recurring forms of argumentation can be identified that overlap with international sovereign citizen repertoires. De Boer identifies three such arguments within Dutch case law concerning sovereign citizens: first, the claim that the law applies not to the living human being but only to an artificial legal person or “strawman”; second, the claim that the state has become a corporation, making its law binding only where explicit consent has been given; and third, the claim that the state, its institutions and its laws are themselves fundamentally illegitimate, either because they violate a higher, “natural” law or because they rest on revisionist accounts of (legal) history (De Boer Reference De Boer2024a: 304–307; Siegel Reference Siegel2024). As De Boer notes, the Dutch material reproduces the same broad argumentative structure identified across jurisdictions, echoing what Netolitzky describes as an international pseudolegal “monoculture” (De Boer Reference De Boer2024a: 304; Netolitzky Reference Netolitzky2023: 796–797; Hobbs et al. Reference Hobbs, Young and McIntyre2024). These insights are relevant here not because this article seeks to reconstruct sovereign citizen doctrine as such, but because they indicate the broad argumentative contours within which the legal consciousness of Dutch sovereign citizens takes shape.
What makes the milieu sociolegally significant is not merely that its espoused narratives align with a wider international sovereign citizen phenomenon, but that it has taken root in a specifically Dutch context. Sovereign citizen rhetoric is often associated with common law jurisdictions; in the Netherlands, by contrast, it appears in a civil law system and within a well-organized, bureaucratized welfare state in which legal authority is typically grounded in procedural correctness, administrative practice, and institutional rationality rather than contract- or rights-based reasoning (Van der Tak and Harambam Reference Van der Tak and Harambam2025: 819–820; De Boer Reference De Boer2024a: 300–301; see also Hertogh Reference Hertogh2023). The Dutch sovereign citizen context is therefore not simply one of foreign (pseudo)legal ideas traveling abroad, but one of translation. Repertoires developed elsewhere – especially in the United States, and in part in Germany – are reformulated in Dutch legal vocabulary, by means of Dutch historical references, and given shape through encounters with Dutch institutions (De Boer Reference De Boer2024a: 301, 304–307; Siegel Reference Siegel2025).
While comparable dynamics have been observed in other European contexts, such as the Reichsbürger in Germany (e.g., Fiebig Reference Fiebig2026), these formations are themselves historically and culturally specific. In the Netherlands, sovereign citizen narratives take shape within a highly institutionalized welfare state, where dense administrative structures both constrain the possibility of disengaging from the state and inform expectations of accessibility, fairness, and procedural accountability. Moreover, Hurenkamp (Reference Hurenkamp2025) suggests that the appeal of this milieu lies not only in anti-state fantasy, but also in the radicalization of themes that are hardly alien to contemporary Dutch political culture: autonomy, authenticity, and the desire to be heard. In a context where legitimacy is strongly mediated through bureaucratic procedure and administrative interaction, sovereign citizen narratives do not simply reject authority, but rework the very terms on which it is experienced and evaluated. This makes the Dutch case particularly relevant for examining how alternative legalities emerge through sustained interaction with the state rather than at its margins. In sum, sovereign citizen narratives take shape within a heterogeneous civil law welfare-state context, drawing on transnational repertoires while being adapted to local institutions, grievances, and symbolic repertoires. The following analysis situates Dutch legal consciousness within this setting.
Living the law otherwise: legal consciousness and legal world-building
The process of legal world-building among Dutch sovereign citizens raises a central concern: how and why individuals come to believe in, enact, and sustain alternative visions of legality. In exploring this concern, we ask how alternative interpretations of law come to feel meaningful and coherent, how they are sustained in practice, and how discrepancies between stated beliefs and situated engagement can be understood.
Built upon the premise that law cannot be disentangled from the social world in which it operates, legal consciousness scholarship rejects the assumption that legal meaning flows exclusively from formal institutions (Chua and Engel Reference Chua and Engel2019; Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Merry Reference Merry1990; Silbey Reference Silbey2005; Young Reference Young2014; Young and Billings Reference Young and Billings2020). Instead, it foregrounds how individuals negotiate and reshape legal authority from below through culturally available narratives, rituals, strategic reinterpretations, and personal acts of sense-making (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Koniak Reference Koniak1996; Merry Reference Merry1990; Moore Reference Moore1973). Concerned with “the ways in which individuals perceive, interpret, and interact with law in their daily lives” (Nielsen Reference Nielsen2024: S4), legal consciousness encompasses both formal juridical knowledge and informal practices, beliefs, and ideologies that shape how people understand, engage with, and resist law (Chua and Engel Reference Chua and Engel2019; Fritsvold Reference Fritsvold2009; Halliday and Morgan Reference Halliday and Morgan2013; Nielsen Reference Nielsen2024). These orientations are “contingent and changing, yet patterned and durable” (Nielsen Reference Nielsen2024: S4), and they are not mutually exclusive. Individuals may shift between or combine them depending on context, experience, and need (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Fritsvold Reference Fritsvold2009; Halliday Reference Halliday2019; Halliday and Morgan Reference Halliday and Morgan2013).
This meaning-making process unfolds within a context of legal pluralism – the coexistence of multiple normative orders within a single social space (Engel Reference Engel1980; Merry Reference Merry1988; Swenson Reference Swenson2018). As Young (Reference Young2014: 520) notes, “if we define law as the normative order within social groups, manifold types of law exist, and state-made law is only one variety.” Individuals may therefore draw on diverse legal repertoires to assert rights, reject obligations, or construct alternative understandings of legality (Kozak-Isik Reference Kozak-Isik2026). Legal consciousness thus directs attention not only to what law is, but to how it becomes meaningful in practice – when and how it comes to feel real, fair, authoritative, or worth resisting.
Foundational work by Ewick and Silbey (Reference Ewick and Silbey1998) foregrounded an understanding of legality as culturally embedded and narratively produced. Their well-known narratives of legal consciousness – before the law, with the law, and against the law – demonstrate that orientations toward legality are multiple, situational, and often internally inconsistent (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Fritsvold Reference Fritsvold2009; Halliday Reference Halliday2019; Halliday and Morgan Reference Halliday and Morgan2013; Young Reference Young2014). Subsequent scholarship has emphasized the relational and culturally embedded nature of legal meaning-making (e.g., Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Halliday Reference Halliday2019; Halliday and Morgan Reference Halliday and Morgan2013; Hertogh Reference Hertogh2018; Silbey Reference Silbey2005; Young Reference Young2014), while also extending the framework to capture forms of legal disengagement or estrangement (Feddersen et al. Reference Feddersen, Wilenmann, Cavieres and Gambardella2024; Halliday and Morgan Reference Halliday and Morgan2013).
Fritsvold (Reference Fritsvold2009) proposed a fourth category – under the law – reflecting a view of the legal system as fundamentally illegitimate and repressive. Similarly, Hertogh (Reference Hertogh2018) advanced the notion of legal alienation as a form of psychological distance and disengagement from law’s promise, where the law is experienced as effectively “nobody’s.” At first glance, sovereign citizen narratives may appear to fit this model, given their distrust of institutions, refusal of legal compliance in specific domains, and rejection of state authority as legitimate (De Boer Reference De Boer, Hertogh and de Winter2025; Löbbert Reference Löbbert2024; Kochi Reference Kochi2025; Fiebig and Koehler Reference Fiebig and Koehler2022). From this perspective, sovereignism might seem to exemplify estrangement from law perceived as illegitimate and repressive. Yet a closer reading reveals a more complex configuration. Participants in this study do not simply withdraw from law or experience it as an external force. Rather, they appropriate the grammar, symbolism, and formalism of legality to construct morally charged counter-interpretations while continuing to engage state institutions in practice (Babcock et al. Reference Babcock, Cohen and Gershon2025; Demian Reference Demian2025). Through this hyperlegalist mode of engagement, they seek to reclaim law by appealing to what they regard as deeper, truer, or more foundational legal principles (Babcock et al. Reference Babcock, Cohen and Gershon2025; Cohen and Gershon Reference Cohen and Gershon2025; Hobbs et al. Reference Hobbs, Young and McIntyre2024; Kochi Reference Kochi2025). This results in a parallel and intensely legalistic reinterpretation of what law is, where it derives its authority, and to whom it properly applies. As Halliday (Reference Halliday2019: 871) reminds us, one cannot be disappointed in law without still caring about it; outrage and disillusionment remain possible only for those for whom state law is, in some sense, “still fundamentally theirs.”
While sovereign citizens may appear to exemplify “strong legal pluralism,” Cohen and Gershon (Reference Cohen and Gershon2025) argue that this is misleading. Rather than advancing a legal order beyond the nation-state, many remain committed to a nation-state framework, albeit one they view as illegitimate in its current form (Cohen and Gershon Reference Cohen and Gershon2025: 8). Their claims thus operate through, rather than outside, the grammar of state legality – reinterpreting and contesting its terms. The analytical challenge, therefore, is not simply to classify orientations toward law, but to understand how competing normative commitments are sustained and managed in ongoing engagement with state authority. For this reason, legal consciousness is treated here not as a classificatory endpoint but as a sensitizing concept (cf. DeLacey Reference DeLacey2025) that directs attention to how legal meaning is produced and negotiated in lived experience.
Recent sociolegal scholarship has foregrounded the generative, world-building dimensions of such engagement. Cohen and Morgan (Reference Cohen and Morgan2023) conceptualize these practices as prefigurative legality: the enactment of an “otherwise” world in which alternative legal visions are treated as already effective (see also Cohen and Gershon Reference Cohen and Gershon2025; Cooper Reference Cooper2017, Reference Cooper2019; Cooper et al. Reference Cooper, Dhawan and Newman2020; van Buuren Reference van Buuren2024). This perspective highlights how sovereign citizens seek not only to contest existing law, but to instantiate alternative legal orders in the present. This emphasis on world-building resonates with Cover’s (Reference Cover1983) account of law as a normative universe constituted through narrative (cf. Geertz Reference Geertz1983; White Reference White2018; Pirie Reference Pirie2013: 56–63). For Cover, legal meaning emerges through stories that link what is, what ought to be, and what might be, rendering law intelligible as a lived world. In his view, each community inhabits its own nomos – understood as “a normative universe” (Cover Reference Cover1983: 4) or an “integrated world of obligation and reality from which the rest of the world is perceived” (Koniak Reference Koniak1996: 67) – and divergent interpretations of legal texts may produce distinct, coexisting normative worlds (Cover Reference Cover1983). This perspective thus directs attention to how legal claims are made meaningful through narrative, rather than assessed solely in terms of doctrinal correctness, for “no set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning” and “once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live” (Cover Reference Cover1983: 4–5).
Attending to narrative is particularly important in the context of sovereign citizen discourse, where legal claims often function as morally charged stories about authority, autonomy, and injustice (De Boer Reference De Boer, Hertogh and de Winter2025; Demian Reference Demian2025; Löbbert Reference Löbbert2024). Cover’s account foregrounds how participants construct alternative normative worlds in which their interpretations of sovereignty and legality become meaningful and actionable (Demian Reference Demian2025). At the same time, an exclusive focus on narrative world-making risks overstating the coherence and stability of such worlds (Pirie Reference Pirie2023). While Cover illuminates their jurisgenerative power, his account is mostly theoretical and less attuned to how these worlds are navigated, adjusted, and sustained in ongoing interaction with legal authorities, particularly where stated beliefs and situated practices do not fully align.
It is here that Kathryne Young’s (Reference Young2014) relational account of legal consciousness becomes particularly valuable. Where Cover’s account foregrounds narrative and normative world-making, Young directs attention to how legal meanings and legitimacy are negotiated in lived encounters with legal authority. As Young (Reference Young2014) argues, “legitimacy is not stagnant […] but constantly affirmed, undermined, created, and recreated in a process both dynamic and iterative” (522–523). Legal consciousness, then, cannot be understood solely as an individual orientation toward law, but must be approached relationally – as shaped by actors’ ongoing assessments of how others perceive, invoke, and enforce legality (Chua and Engel Reference Chua and Engel2019; Hertogh Reference Hertogh2023; Kozak-Isik Reference Kozak-Isik2026; Nielsen Reference Nielsen2024). Young’s account is particularly useful for attending to the relationship – and potential divergence – between how actors narrate their understandings of legality and how they enact and navigate legal claims in encounters with institutional authority, including how both are shaped by actual and anticipated responses from others.
Taken together, these perspectives frame sovereign citizen legal consciousness as both narratively constructed and relationally negotiated, with legality continuously developed and reevaluated in encounters with legal authorities and shaped by anticipations of how others respond. This paper treats legal consciousness as a sensitizing concept that directs analytical attention to how sovereign legality is produced and negotiated in practice. It foregrounds both the jurisgenerative force of alternative legal narratives and the frictions that arise when these are enacted within formal legal settings.
Methods and analysis
Data collection
Consistent with this study’s idiographic commitment, data collection focused on a purposive sample of in-depth interviews with four respondents. In total, six interviews were conducted: one participant was interviewed three times (once by phone and twice in person), another twice (once by phone and once in person), and two participants once in a joint online interview (Microsoft Teams). Initial phone conversations were intended as rapport-building and access negotiations in a context marked by distrust toward institutions and researchers. In both cases, however, these interactions developed into substantive conversations that informed the analysis. While these calls were not audio-recorded, detailed field notes were taken. All formal interviews, including the online session, were audio-recorded and transcribed.
Participants were recruited through snowball sampling and selected based on a self-articulated sovereign or autonomous stance toward law. While some explicitly adopted these labels (with “autonomous” more common in the Dutch context), others described themselves as in the process of “discovering” such orientations or mobilized sovereign legal reasoning while rejecting the label itself. What united them was a shared reimagining of legality and a critical engagement with state authority, rights, and legal obligation. The interviews form part of the first author’s broader PhD project on distrust and alienation vis-à-vis the Dutch state and “the system.” This wider context is analytically relevant, as participants frequently situated their legal claims within narratives of institutional failure, “awakening,” and systemic betrayal. The recurrent sentiment that “things just don’t add up” formed part of the experiential backdrop through which their legal understandings took shape. Given the sensitivity of participants’ legal views and practices, careful consideration was given to anonymization and ethical representation. All interview data were anonymized during transcription through the removal or alteration of identifying details (e.g., names, locations, case-specific information) and the use of pseudonyms. Although two participants indicated they would not object to being identified, anonymization was maintained to ensure consistency across the dataset and to mitigate potential risks, including legal exposure and further stigmatization in public and institutional discourse.
To situate these accounts, the study also draws on six courtroom observations involving different defendants employing sovereign/autonomous reasoning. These were not the same individuals as the interview participants. Rather than serving as triangulation or validation, the observations provide an additional analytical vantage point on how sovereign legality is enacted in practice under institutional constraint, capturing verbal exchanges, legal rhetoric, and embodied performances in formal legal settings (see also Siegel Reference Siegel2025). Courtroom interactions are inherently performative and shaped by institutional authority, procedural constraints, and asymmetrical consequences, as defendants must operate within settings where relevance, legitimacy, and outcome are institutionally defined. As such, they do not provide transparent access to participants’ internal beliefs, but rather to how legal claims and identities are strategically articulated and adapted in response to institutional expectations. For courtroom material, ethical considerations centered less on formal anonymity – given the public nature of proceedings – and more on limiting the potential reproduction of stigma. Identifying details were therefore omitted in reporting, and cases are presented in a way that foregrounds interactional dynamics rather than individual traceability. Together, the two data sources illuminate different dimensions of the same phenomenon: interviews foreground how sovereign legality is constructed and narrated as a lived normative world, while courtroom observations show how these narratives are enacted, negotiated, performed, and sometimes challenged in interaction with legal authority.
Analytical strategy
This study employs IPA to examine how individuals make sense of significant experiences (Hartman and Squires Reference Hartman and Squires2024; Pietkiewicz and Smith Reference Pietkiewicz and Smith2014; Smith Reference Smith2017). IPA is grounded in a double hermeneutic, whereby the researcher seeks to make sense of participants making sense of their world (Smith and Osborn Reference Smith and Osborn2015: 26). The approach is characterized by an idiographic commitment to detailed, case-by-case analysis, ensuring that individual experiences remain visible while also identifying patterns of convergence and divergence across the sample. Rather than aiming for statistical generalization, IPA prioritizes depth and attends to participants as situated meaning-makers embedded in social and institutional contexts (Hartman and Squires Reference Hartman and Squires2024; Pietkiewicz and Smith Reference Pietkiewicz and Smith2014).
Participants were purposively selected based on their engagement with sovereign or autonomous legal reasoning. While IPA often works with relatively homogeneous samples (Smith Reference Smith2017), homogeneity here lies not in shared identification with specific labels, but in participants’ shared mobilization of alternative legal narratives and understandings. Interviews were semi-structured rather than rigidly structured, allowing participants to articulate their experiences and legal reasoning in their own terms, – an important feature in a context where meaning-making is closely tied to narratives of rupture, discovery, and reinterpretation.
IPA is particularly suited to sociolegal inquiry into legal consciousness, as it foregrounds how legal meaning is constructed and narrated in lived experience (Chua and Engel Reference Chua and Engel2019; Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Young Reference Young2014). Legal claims are embedded in stories that organize experience morally, temporally, and affectively (e.g., Cover Reference Cover1983; see also Van den Haak and Grusauskaite Reference Van den Haak and Grusauskaite2026), especially in sovereign citizen contexts where narratives of institutional betrayal, “awakening,” and redefinition of the self vis-à-vis the state structure legal reasoning (De Boer Reference De Boer2024a). Consistent with IPA’s idiographic and exploratory orientation, no predefined coding scheme was applied. Instead, theoretical concepts were introduced at later stages as sensitizing lenses. Cover’s (Reference Cover1983) account of narrative and normative world-making directed attention to how participants connect legal meanings to broader narratives of authority, justice, and obligation, while Young’s (Reference Young2014) relational account informed how legitimacy is formed dynamically and iteratively. This interpretative stance acknowledges that findings are co-produced through the researcher’s analytical engagement with participants’ accounts, rather than directly reflecting participants’ perspectives. Moreover, the analysis brackets the truth-value of participants’ legal claims, treating them as empirical expressions of meaning-making rather than evaluating their doctrinal validity, thereby avoiding both legitimization and ridicule.
Analytic procedure
Analysis followed iterative IPA stages:
Immersion
Transcripts were read repeatedly to grasp each participant’s narrative as a whole, focusing on key experiential moments, narrative structure, and positioning vis-à-vis legality and authority. Particular attention was given to tension, ambivalence, and contradiction, including pauses, metaphors, and rhetorical shifts. Analysis also examined how participants interpreted institutional responses and (re)positioned their claims in relation to them. Case-specific memos were produced, documenting core narratives, normative frameworks, imagined legal futures, rupture moments, and moments of tension or situational adaptation. This preserved IPA’s idiographic focus prior to cross-case analysis.
Initial noting
Initial comments focused on what participants said, how they expressed it, and what it might mean. In vivo expressions (e.g., “het klopt gewoon niet”) were retained as markers of perceived rupture in legal legitimacy.
Emergent patterns
Cross-case analysis identified recurring meaning-making processes, rather than fixed categories:
1. rupture and delegitimation
2. construction of alternative normative worlds
3. reflexive and strategic navigation of institutional reality.
These patterns capture how sovereign legality emerges as an ongoing, negotiated project, particularly in the uneasy space between personal conviction and institutional constraint.
Results
The following vignettes offer idiographic portraits of participants’ lived engagements with legality and institutional authority. While each account is situated and internally complex, recurring patterns emerge across cases in how legality is interpreted, contested, and navigated.
John and Sue describe themselves as “awake” and autonomous. John presents his trajectory in retrospect as a gradual “awakening,” shaped in part by Sue – who, he notes, “was awake a bit earlier than I was” – and by the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted them to “do more research” and made them increasingly critical of state authority. Throughout the interview, John speaks in a measured, often laconic tone, repeatedly returning to what he perceives as a widening gap between institutional narratives and everyday reality. In his telling, state authority appears increasingly manipulative, self-serving, and reliant on the strategic production of fear. At the core of the couple’s reasoning lies a contractual understanding in which legal obligation depends on explicit consent (cf. De Boer Reference De Boer2024a; Siegel Reference Siegel2024). Taxes, John argues with visible irritation, are “illegally forced upon us.” By contrast, the couple continues to meet obligations they regard as consensual. When asked whether they still pay for utilities and housing, he laughs briefly: “Yes, of course we do. We signed a contract for those things. But I never signed a contract for paying taxes … we never consented to that.” Obligation is not rejected outright but selectively redrawn by the pair.
Official warnings and enforcement signals are treated with similar skepticism. John describes them as “scaremongering,” extending this logic beyond taxation to other domains where, in his view, fear is used to discourage independent judgment. “Take the weather forecast – code yellow, code orange. What is that all about? Can we not just see for ourselves whether we can go outside? They just want to prevent us from waking up further,” he explains. “If they keep you afraid, they keep you from thinking critically.” This broader distrust also informs decisions around voting and vaccination, both of which the couple rejects in terms that emphasize personal autonomy and resistance to perceived manipulation. At the same time, their stance does not involve a complete withdrawal from institutional life. John continues to use medical services and mentions a scheduled hospital appointment later that week. When asked whether providers might refuse care given his conflict with health insurance, he responds without hesitation: “They have an obligation to help you. They cannot refuse.” Yet this bravado is not without consequences. He returns several times to a sense of social distance from others: “You try to tell people about things that really matter for them, but they refuse to listen.” Combined, their account shows how deep distrust of state authority coexists with continued reliance on selected institutions, particularly where obligations are seen as consensual or unavoidable.
Boas believes that “the system is not there to empower people, but to control them and keep them small.” He does not describe himself as fully autonomous but rather “on a pathway to autonomy,” still “learning, figuring out which road works best.” He recounts this trajectory as shaped by lectures, books, and personal experiences that, in his view, revealed inconsistencies between official accounts and lived reality. The COVID-19 period figures prominently in this process, which he recalls as a time when “all criticism was pushed aside,” intensifying his concern about the marginalization of alternative perspectives. Reflecting on earlier stages, he notes: “At one point I really doubted myself; thought I was crazy. But then I realized: I am not crazy – the world is crazy.”
Central to his account is a distinction between what he calls “the law” and “legislation” (“wet” and “wetgeving”). He frequently returns to the claim that “you can look it up – it’s simply written in the law.” In his interpretation, law in its proper sense prohibits only fundamental harms such as coercion, theft, and violence (law), while most state rules govern voluntary interactions (legislation). This understanding is closely tied to a broader moral claim about equality: “We are all creatures of this greater whole. So we are all equal. No one has anything to say over you unless you give them that authority.” To explain legal obligation, Boas draws on everyday exchange. “If I want to buy a bicycle from you, you can say: I want a hundred euros for it … then there is an agreement. But I cannot force you to sell your bike and you cannot force me to give you money.” Extending this reasoning to taxation, he argues: “With the tax authority it is the same; it is simply a company … it sends a proposal.” In this view, the absence of explicit consent is decisive: without a valid agreement, no obligation exists. This position has had tangible consequences. Ongoing conflict with the tax authorities has resulted in the blocking of his bank account. He is particularly troubled by what he sees as procedural inconsistency: “While legally speaking they are not allowed to do it at all – they just continue.” The situation has taken an emotional toll. “I have had sleepless nights over it,” he admits. “Sometimes you start to wonder: should I really continue with this?” Yet he frames compliance as morally untenable: “What is the alternative? That would mean bowing to the oppressor – and I refuse to do that.” In his understanding of legality, Boas weaves together legal reasoning, moral claims about equality, and negative institutional encounters while also revealing ongoing uncertainty about the consequences of maintaining this position.
When we spoke, Lia was moving between the homes of friends and family while recovering from a serious accident that had left her unable to work. Reflecting on her situation, she remarked with visible fatigue: “I have traveled enough for all my life; I am worn out.”
In her account, distrust of institutional authority is rooted in a layered history of negative encounters with youth care, housing authorities, and municipal bureaucracies. She describes these not simply as administrative difficulties but as experiences that felt deeply unfair and undermined her sense of being recognized and treated justly. Lia does not identify with labels such as “autonomous” or “sovereign.” She rejects such categorizations explicitly: “You are autonomous in how you act. And we are all born sovereign in this country, so why would you still have to declare that?” At the same time, she is critical of groups that, in her view, turn these ideas into commodified promises. Despite this, her reasoning reflects logics often associated with such positions. She describes the Netherlands as “a company,” framing her relationship to the state in contractual terms. Discussing debt collection, she states: “I do not have a contract with that bailiff, so why should I pay? You hired them – if you want them to be paid, fine, you pay. I did not hire them.” She also distinguishes between the living person and the administrative identity attached to one’s name, which she sees as imposed without consent. Referring to official documents, she notes: “Look at the names: Capitals. Capitals. Capitals. That means I am not recognized as a living being.”
At the same time, her stance does not amount to a complete rejection of institutions. Courts remain, in principle, legitimate forums for resolving disputes, but their legitimacy depends on how she is treated. When asked whether she retains any trust, she draws a distinction: “I have faith in the goodness of people. But I have no trust in the way things are written on paper.” Trust, once damaged, is actively withdrawn: “If you damage it, fine – I will not harm you, but I have nothing more to do with you.” She presents herself as someone who corrects, warns, and educates – including officials. Describing a municipal employee who, in her view, used incorrect paperwork, she explains that according to a “proper” interpretation of the law, “this woman could get six years in prison […] should I then say: if you don’t want to listen, you will have to feel the consequences? No – I would rather she learn from it.” Her account shows how repeated negative experiences with institutions lead her to continually assess authority in terms of trust, reciprocity, and fairness, without rejecting it outright.
Narrative stances
Across the material, participants’ accounts do not simply express distrust or alternative beliefs about law. Rather, they reveal three distinct but interrelated ways in which legality itself is reworked in practice. These narrative stances are not fixed positions, but recurring modes of sense-making through which institutional authority is evaluated, alternative normative orders are articulated, and legal engagement is strategically managed. Taken together, these three stances constitute the article’s central empirical finding: they show how sovereign legality is produced not through stable doctrine, but through recurring narrative practices of contesting, re-authoring, and navigating legality.
Legitimacy under contestation
This first stance captures a shift in which institutional authority is no longer presumed, but becomes something that must be continuously justified in interaction. Legitimacy is not rejected outright, but evaluated as conditional, relational, and revisable depending on whether institutions are perceived to act transparently, reciprocally, and in good faith. Consequently, authority becomes contingent on whether institutional actors are perceived to act in ways that can be recognized as “reasonable” within the situation at hand. Across accounts, this stance is often rooted in moments participants describe as ruptures – encounters in which institutional actions no longer align with their expectations of fairness or legality.
Boas, for instance, traces this shift to the pandemic period, which he experienced as marked by the exclusion of alternative perspectives. During this period, he began to feel that “something just wasn’t right here,” prompting what he described as a period of intensive personal research guided by intuition. Increasingly, he came to view the system not as a structure designed to empower citizens, but as one intended “to manage them.” What initially appeared as a diffuse sense that “something just wasn’t right” developed into a sustained practice of scrutinizing institutional claims against alternative standards of legality and fairness. Even as his confidence in institutions declines, he continues to treat “the law” as an evaluative benchmark, against which institutional behavior can be assessed – insisting that officials must demonstrate the legality of their actions. The problem, in his account, lies not with legal principles per se but with their distortion in practice. As he explains: “They are obliged to show that their actions are legitimate. That is just how it is by law. And if they don’t […] it is all written in the law, they cannot recover the alleged debt.”
A similar logic appears in John and Sue’s account, where legitimacy is similarly made conditional on whether institutional power can be reconciled with foundational legal and moral principles. Authority is mostly evaluated through its perceived alignment with basic prohibitions against coercion and harm, and is perceived as legitimate only insofar as it adheres to those principles; when it does not, it becomes unlawful. They narrate their refusal to pay taxes not as a rejection of law as such, but as grounded in the claim that coercion violates fundamental legal principles. As John states: “It is actually not allowed to force someone. Forcing someone is illegal. That is the law: no forcing, no lying, no stealing. But the criminal government (‘roverheid’) does all of that.” Whereas Boas’s distrust crystallizes around specific encounters, John and Sue extend suspicion to a broader systemic level. Institutional power is described as opaque, automated, and detached from accountable human actors. “It’s all a digital system anyway – there are no longer any humans involved in it … It is all one big puppet show.” The metaphor conveys a sense that visible governance masks hidden orchestration. Authority appears hollowed out and structurally deceptive, reinforcing the perception that society itself is being quietly manipulated – that “we are all just slaves to the system” (cf. Van der Tak and Harambam Reference Van der Tak and Harambam2025: 828–830).
For Lia, contestation takes a more procedural form. Experiences with courts and administrative bodies lead her to question whether decisions are made transparently or in good faith. Restricted access to case materials or perceived irregularities in hearings are interpreted as signs that “something is not right,” prompting her to reassess the legitimacy of institutional processes. Her perception of legality was formed by many negative institutional encounters (“what hasn’t gone wrong between me and the system”). She evaluates institutions through a lens of procedural fairness, reciprocity, and accountability: when officials fail to act transparently or appear unwilling to engage, their authority is experienced as compromised (“you explain that to me. You can’t. Because it doesn’t add up”). In this sense, legality is neither accepted nor rejected wholesale, but conditionally and relationally upheld depending on whether it aligns with her expectations of fairness and good faith.
This relational calibration of authority also becomes visible in courtroom interactions, where institutional legitimacy is continuously tested in situ. In one observed hearing, a defendant described herself as having “been awake and fighting the system for many years” and stated that her “faith in the system had disappeared.” She refused assigned counsel and questioned the necessity of the proceedings, calling the trial “a waste of taxpayer money.” Yet her stance was not absolute. While discussing a dispute over homeschooling, she added that she “would have been okay with an in-between solution,” referring to a middle ground where her children would only attend school a few days per week – indicating that accommodation remained possible under conditions she considered reasonable.
Scrutiny of authority also extends beyond abstract institutional critique to the concrete actors through which authority is enacted. In one case, a defendant confronted a court usher over an unprocessed recusal request. When told he was “just the court usher,” the defendant rejected this institutional compartmentalization, arguing that the usher nonetheless represented the court and was therefore personally accountable for its actions. Later in the proceedings, when addressed by his surname, he declared that “this person is no longer alive,” insisting instead on being addressed by his first name before eventually continuing with the hearing. This oscillation between engagement and refusal illustrates how institutional roles and legal identities are treated not as fixed categories, but as negotiable claims that can be accepted or withdrawn.
A similar dynamic is visible in a separate case involving a former police officer, where institutional authority was challenged in explicitly performative terms. When a municipal representative claimed to speak on behalf of the entire society, audience members interrupted with “Not us!” – actively contesting the assumption of collective representation. Addressing the judge, the defendant refused to sit, stating: “I will remain standing – for I am not in a contract with you,” and adding, “You need to respect my dignity. I am not part of your contract.” Yet even in this highly oppositional moment, contestation was not fixed. After initially requesting the judge’s recusal, she later withdrew the request, describing him as “human and friendly” and stating that she had “felt a form of humanity.” Across these interactions, authority is continuously performed, recognized, and attributed in interaction. Contestation is therefore not absolute refusal, but an ongoing evaluation of whether institutional actors are perceived as acting in ways that can be recognized as legitimate – by listening, providing proper documentation, and acting transparently. When officials are, in Lia’s words, perceived to act “like human beings with common sense,” trust may be extended; when they adhere rigidly to procedural scripts, it is withdrawn. Legitimacy under contestation thus operates less as a rejection of institutional authority than as a continuous calibration of when and how authority is recognized in situated interaction.
Re-authoring the normative order
While the first stance concerns how institutional authority is evaluated in interaction, this second stance reflects a more fundamental shift in how legality itself is understood. Rather than treating the state as the sole source of legal authority, participants re-ground legality in alternative normative foundations – such as consent, morality, natural law, or humanity – against which state law is assessed and interpreted. These reconfigurations rarely take the form of coherent doctrines. Instead, they emerge as situated responses to a perceived gap between institutional practice and participants’ sense of how legality ought to function. Critique is therefore not only oppositional but also constructive, grounded in broader moral intuitions about fairness, equality, responsibility, and legitimate governance.
Boas articulates this re-authoring most explicitly through his distinction between “law” and “legislation.” In his account, genuine law protects against fundamental harms, while most state rules govern voluntary interactions and therefore require consent. “That is simply the law,” he explains. “If you murder someone, the law says you receive that punishment. Period.” By contrast, “the rest … is based on mutual consent … It only applies if we agree to it. Otherwise it does not apply.” This distinction allows him to reinterpret taxation and administrative enforcement not as binding obligations, but as contingent forms of exchange that require consent. He repeatedly emphasizes this through everyday analogies: “I cannot force you to sell your bike, and you cannot force me to give you money.” This contractual logic also shapes his moral evaluation of participation. Referring to taxation and voting, he explains:
It’s not that I mind paying taxes, but we’re sending money to Israel to buy weapons and wipe out the Gaza Strip. If you pay taxes, you’re partially responsible for that. It’s the same with voting – when you vote for someone, you’re basically saying: you’re going to represent me … I’m happy to pay Taxes for services that serve humanity, but not for services that destroy humanity.
Similar reasoning appears in the accounts of John and Sue, who likewise frame taxation and voting as forms of consent to systems they consider unjust. As John reflects, “most of us don’t want to believe that people can actually be that bad … but the bad one percent has the power.” Yet their critique is not purely negative. It is accompanied by a broader normative imagination – of a society organized differently, whether through political transformation (“we need to arrest all those currently in charge”) or through a return to what they describe as more “natural” forms of living: “We need to go back to plant medicines, to nature … there are so many remedies in that. But there is no money in that.”
Across interviews and courtroom encounters, these alternative frameworks often hinge on a redefinition of the legal subject. Participants distinguish between bureaucratic identities – such as “citizen” or “legal person” – and a more fundamental status as a “human being,” similar to international sovereign citizen narratives (De Boer Reference De Boer2024a; Hobbs et al. Reference Hobbs, Young and McIntyre2024; Siegel Reference Siegel2024). As Boas puts it: “You can choose whether you stand there as a human being or as a natural person – then you enter different areas of law.” In interactions with judges, he makes this explicit: “I just explain to him: we are equal. You have nothing to say over me. I am a human being, you are a human being.” Such statements do not simply reject institutional legality but reposition it within a broader field of competing normative orders, in which authority is grounded differently and can be reclassified rather than treated as singular or final. This is also evident in practice. In one housing dispute, a defendant insisted he was “a human, not a citizen,” invoking human rights to argue that “forcing someone equals slavery, which is illegal in the Netherlands.” In another case, a defendant rejected the court’s naming conventions, introducing herself as a “woman of flesh and blood” and replacing her “birthday” with an “earthday,” thereby reworking bureaucratic identity categories through an alternative understanding of personhood grounded in embodiment and nature rather than administrative classification.
Lia’s account reflects a related but more relational form of re-authoring. While she shares a distrust of bureaucratic practices, her evaluation of authority centers on integrity and reciprocity, deriving legitimacy not only from formal rules but also from the quality of institutional engagement. Reflecting on an interaction with a municipal official, she argues: “If she doesn’t want to listen to me, that means she doesn’t trust the people she is meant to represent. If there is no trust, what is she doing there?”
Taken together, these accounts show how participants construct alternative normative reference points – rooted in consent, equality, moral responsibility, and humanity – through which institutional authority is reinterpreted rather than simply opposed. These reference points do not replace institutional legality, nor do they form a unified alternative system. Instead, they function as interpretive resources for navigating tensions between institutional law and moral evaluation, allowing participants to sustain critique while maintaining engagement with broader ideas of justice and legitimacy.
Strategic navigation of institutional reality
The third stance captures how sovereign legality is sustained in practice through situational engagement with institutional authority. Rather than indicating inconsistency, the apparent coexistence of critique, compliance, and alternative reasoning reflects a practical repertoire through which participants navigate legal settings under shifting constraints. Engagement with law thus involves the flexible mobilization of conventional legal reasoning, moral claims, and performative gestures in response to context.
Courtroom interactions make this particularly visible. In one criminal hearing, two defendants repeatedly invoked “natural law” to frame their actions, emphasizing that they sought dialogue rather than confrontation. When asked whether a proposed “civil arrest” might be intimidating, one defendant justified it in legal terms before clarifying that his guiding principle remained: “do no harm.” At the same time, both engaged in largely conventional ways – answering questions, addressing the judge, and even joking with the prosecutor. When one was asked whether he considered himself a jurist, he replied that he had “enough basic knowledge of law not to be a complete fool in this area,” prompting laughter when the prosecutor responded that he had not been particularly impressed. Assertions of alternative legality thus coexist with routine procedural participation. Moreover, in some cases, alternative legal repertoires are selectively foregrounded or withdrawn depending on institutional response and perceived chances of success. In a series of cases involving the same defendant, sovereignist arguments were invoked in some hearings but abandoned in another, where a procedural claim succeeded, and the court acknowledged an administrative error. This suggests that legal reasoning is not fixed but adaptively deployed in relation to perceived openings and constraints.
At key moments, however, such rhetoric serves broader symbolic purposes. In his final statement, one defendant reframed his criminal court case as part of a wider societal conflict:
This case is not about me or [co-defendant], but about a gigantic group of Dutch people who have lost trust since corona … Critics of government policy have been labeled “wappie,” “conspiracy theorist,” “sovereign,” and eventually “extremist.” I have a clean record, live according to natural law – do no harm –, am critical but peaceful, and distance myself from violence.
His co-defendant similarly grounded his position in moral and spiritual terms: “I have never been in contact with justice before; I live from the heart, with justice and righteousness, and follow a spiritual path.” Here, legal proceedings become a site not only of defense but also of articulating claims about legitimacy, recognition, and belonging.
Participants’ reflections further indicate how such adaptability is shaped by material and institutional pressures. Boas describes an ongoing tension between conviction and financial precarity: “I’m still wrestling with this – does it even make sense to put energy into it? … I notice it financially. If the costs keep rising, I can barely afford all these taxes ….” After losing a case, he reflects: “You follow the rules … and when you show they are not following them, they ignore it. What can you do then? You feel a bit powerless.”
Social relations introduce similar negotiations. John and Sue describe a sense of unwanted distance from those they consider “not awake,” while maintaining everyday interaction. When asked how they navigate these differences, Sue hesitates: “I really wouldn’t know.” John adds: “Me neither. I find that difficult … really difficult.” At the same time, he emphasizes continuity in everyday interaction: “I treat people who aren’t awake the same as I would awake people … it doesn’t matter how they think.” Yet they also downplay the practical centrality of “autonomy” in daily life: “It doesn’t mean much … except for those notices from taxes ….” What emerges is not a fixed identity but a practice of situational adjustment across different institutional and social contexts.
These examples demonstrate behavioral adaptation and capture shifts in how legal claims are presented and strategically deployed within particular encounters. Moreover, Boas’s reflections on financial pressure and doubt suggest that sustained institutional friction may unsettle existing commitments. However, it cannot be inferred that participants’ underlying understandings of legality changed as a result of these encounters. In sum, this stance captures how sovereign legality is sustained through adaptive engagement: not as coherence or contradiction, but as the ongoing (re)calibration of claims and strategies within encounters with authority.
Discussion: sovereign legality as narrative practice
The empirical material suggests that sovereign legality is best understood not as a fixed ideology or simple rejection of state law, but as a form of narrative legal consciousness through which individuals reinterpret legality, authority, obligation, and (legal) responsibility in light of lived experience. Participants do not position themselves outside the law; rather, they rework its meaning from within. In this respect, their accounts align with sociolegal understandings of legal consciousness as situated, interpretive, and narratively mediated engagement with law in everyday life (Chua and Engel Reference Chua and Engel2019; Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Young Reference Young2014).
The three narrative stances identified in the analysis together specify how this process unfolds in practice. First, institutional authority becomes subject to ongoing moral and relational evaluation rather than taken-for-granted legitimacy. Second, participants relocate legality to alternative normative foundations – such as consent, natural law, or humanity – through which state law is reinterpreted and, where necessary, displaced. Third, these alternative understandings are sustained through situational and strategic engagement with institutional settings, where critique, compliance, and performative assertion coexist. We posit that these stances may then be seen as elements of counter-nomic legal consciousness: a narrative and relational mode of legal meaning-making through which individuals contest state authority while remaining deeply invested in law’s language, procedures, and symbolic force.
While analytically distinct, these (often overlapping) stances should not be read as fixed or internally coherent positions. Rather, in line with IPA’s double hermeneutic, they reflect an interpretive effort to make sense of participants’ accounts, which – when read across contexts – appear as shifting and sometimes tension-filled engagements with legality. This does not imply that participants themselves necessarily experience their positions as incoherent; instead, it points to the ongoing work through which legal meaning is articulated and maintained. Taken together, these stances show that sovereign legality is not defined by doctrinal consistency, but by the continuous negotiation of legal meaning under conditions of perceived institutional misalignment.
A key feature of this engagement is its reliance on portable legal imaginaries. Participants invoke concepts such as “common law” or “maritime law” that lack grounding in the Dutch civil law system, yet function as symbolic resources for articulating alternative legality. These references are less doctrinal claims than expressions of imagined legal orders grounded in consent, natural law, and individual sovereignty. Legal meaning is thus not only produced in relation to local and national legal institutions, but also through transnationally circulating narratives that are selectively appropriated and reassembled (Van der Tak and Harambam Reference Van der Tak and Harambam2025: 836–837). Sovereign legality emerges in this sense as locally enacted but globally informed. This is analytically significant in light of the Dutch context. The material shows that sovereign legal reasoning not only travels into this context, but is reworked within it. Participants mobilize contractual and consent-based logics precisely in response to forms of authority that are experienced as impersonal, opaque, or procedurally rigid. In doing so, they expose how different legal traditions shape both the content and the contestation of legal consciousness. The Dutch case thus suggests that sovereign legality is not confined to particular legal systems, but emerges through the interaction between globally circulating legal imaginaries and locally specific configurations of institutional authority.
At the same time, this engagement is not merely symbolic. The material shows that sovereign legality is processual and sustained through ongoing interpretive work. Encounters with institutional authority – tax enforcement, welfare administration, courtroom proceedings – do not produce disengagement, but further reinterpretation. Participants revisit legal texts, draw distinctions (e.g., between “law” and “legislation”), and embed these readings within broader moral narratives about coercion, consent, and responsibility. This dynamic aligns with sociolegal scholarship showing that legal meaning emerges through everyday encounters with institutions (Ewick and Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Nielsen Reference Nielsen2024; Young Reference Young2014), while extending it by demonstrating that even heterodox interpretations remain anchored in engagement with law rather than withdrawal from it. Alternative legal meaning is thus shaped in moments when law becomes experientially salient or contested – where the law becomes “real” (Löbbert Reference Löbbert2024: 321–322; Geertz Reference Geertz1983). As Koniak (Reference Koniak1996) observed, such legal claims rarely appear doctrinally coherent to outsiders, yet their partial and shifting character may not be a weakness but a structural feature of this form of legal consciousness. In other words: “from our side of the wall, these beliefs and activities look disjointed and bizarre, but there is meaning here” (Koniak Reference Koniak1996: 5).
These findings sit somewhat uneasily within existing typologies of legal consciousness. While accounts such as Ewick and Silbey’s (Reference Ewick and Silbey1998) distinguish between compliance, resistance, and cynicism, the stances identified here cut across these categories. Legitimacy under contestation shows that authority is neither accepted nor rejected wholesale, but evaluated relationally and conditionally. Re-authoring the normative order demonstrates that critique is not merely oppositional, but generative, producing alternative normative frameworks rather than simply resisting existing ones. Strategic navigation of institutional reality reveals that apparent inconsistency is not a deviation from legal consciousness, but part of how participants negotiate tensions between their understandings of legality and the demands of institutional practice. What appears doctrinally implausible from a legal perspective is, sociologically, a form of intensified legal engagement (Babcock et al. Reference Babcock, Cohen and Gershon2025; Gillespie Reference Gillespie2026). Following Cover (Reference Cover1983) and Koniak (Reference Koniak1996), these practices can be understood as the construction of alternative nomoi: normative worlds in which legal meaning is embedded in narratives about justice, authority, and legitimacy. Sovereignty, in this sense, operates less as a legal status than as a narrative device for re-situating the self in relation to authority (Harris Reference Harris2005). At the same time, the material refines existing work on dissentive legal consciousness (Feddersen et al. Reference Feddersen, Wilenmann, Cavieres and Gambardella2024; Halliday and Morgan Reference Halliday and Morgan2013). Rather than coalescing into a stable collective identity, participants’ skepticism toward state law and appeals to higher normative orders emerge from the data as individualized narrative constructions assembled through personal trajectories. This helps explain why participants frequently reject labels such as “sovereign citizen” while still drawing on its repertoires.
The material further highlights the affective and relational dimensions of this engagement (Chua and Engel Reference Chua and Engel2019; Kozak-Isik Reference Kozak-Isik2026; Young Reference Young2014). Participants must continuously negotiate tensions between their normative commitments and the practical demands of everyday life, including taxation, employment, and administrative compliance. Sovereign legality thus emerges as a fragile and effortful hermeneutic practice, sustained through ongoing adjustment between conviction and institutional constraint. This interpretive orientation is marked by a persistent stance of suspicion toward institutional authority and bureaucratic governance. In line with Ricoeur’s notion of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Reference Ricoeur1970; see also Harambam Reference Harambam2020: 213–216; Josselson Reference Josselson2004; Scott-Baumann Reference Scott-Baumann2009), participants treat legal meaning as something that must be uncovered rather than taken at face value. Their engagement with law involves questioning surface meanings and searching for deeper truths behind legal texts and institutional practices. In this respect, it resembles the interpretive work of conspiracy or alternative theorizing more generally (Siegel Reference Siegel2024; Löbbert Reference Löbbert2024; Kochi Reference Kochi2025; Rathje Reference Rathje2022). While not a formal hermeneutical project, this interpretive stance provides an ongoing resource for constructing alternative normative frameworks, even where these may harden into more closed or dogmatic positions.
Courtroom interactions make visible how this form of legal consciousness is sustained in practice. Participants move between different forms of legal reasoning, invoking alternative frameworks such as natural law, contractual reasoning, or international treaties while simultaneously engaging in procedural routines. Challenges to authority are embedded within ongoing participation: defendants question jurisdiction while answering questions, reject legal identity while addressing the court, and contest authority while relying on its procedures. Legal engagement thus takes the form of strategic navigation within institutional procedures. As Koniak (Reference Koniak1996) and Demian (Reference Demian2025) suggest, such claims are not necessarily aimed at doctrinal success, but operate as tactical resources, performative assertions, and narrative devices that sustain coherence across institutional encounters.
This helps explain a central tension in the material: participants persist in these forms of legal reasoning despite limited institutional success. Legal argumentation is not only instrumental, but also expressive and constitutive. In this respect, participants’ engagement resonates with Levy’s (Reference Levy2022) notion of “serious players” – “they don’t quite believe them, but they don’t quite disbelieve them either. They’re suspended between belief and disbelief, because they’re immersed in the game” (4). This suspension enables continued investment in alternative legal frameworks, even as their practical limits become apparent. We argue that sovereign legality thus operates as a mode of situated engagement in which legal reasoning serves interpretive, practical, and affective functions, providing coherence, a sense of control, and a way of navigating institutional uncertainty (De Boer Reference De Boer, Hertogh and de Winter2025; Fuchs and Kretschmann Reference Fuchs and Kretschmann2019; O’Sullivan Reference O’Sullivan, Hobbs, Young and McIntyre2025; Schönberger Reference Schönberger, Schönberger and Schönberger2020). In this respect, the findings also resonate with research on procedurally unconventional legal claims by litigants in person (Leader Reference Leader2024; see also Kretschmann et al. Reference Kretschmann, Moralis, Zeigermann, Kretschmann, Moralis and Zeigermann2024), suggesting that such claims may articulate substantively meaningful critiques of institutional power. References to contracts, jurisdiction, or legal status often function as proxies for broader concerns about fairness, accountability, and legitimacy. These dynamics connect to wider cultural currents (Cohen and Gershon Reference Cohen and Gershon2025, Reference Cohen and Gershon2026: 342–344), including a perceived tension between bureaucratic governance and aspirations for autonomy and meaningful self-determination (van Buuren Reference van Buuren2024: 58; cf. Van der Tak and Harambam Reference Van der Tak and Harambam2025; De Boer Reference De Boer, Hertogh and de Winter2025; O’Sullivan Reference O’Sullivan, Hobbs, Young and McIntyre2025).
Conclusion
This article has shown that Dutch sovereign citizen legality is less a rejection of law than a reconfiguration of it. Participants interpret legal texts, institutions, and procedures through alternative normative frameworks, constructing narratives in which authority is contingent, negotiable, and grounded in moral or “higher” principles. We conceptualize this as counter-nomic legal consciousness: a narrative and relational mode of legal meaning-making through which individuals contest state authority while remaining deeply invested in law’s language, procedures, and symbolic force. By combining legal consciousness theory with Cover’s account of law as a normative world constituted through narrative, the analysis shows how alternative legal meanings are narratively constructed, situationally enacted, and sustained through everyday encounters with institutions, further nuancing binary distinctions between compliance and resistance in sociolegal scholarship.
This study has several limitations. Based on a small, context-specific sample of interviews and courtroom observations, the findings are analytically rich but not broadly generalizable. The interpretive analysis may attribute coherence to accounts that are more situational in practice, while both interviews and courtroom interactions provide partial, performative perspectives on legal consciousness. The current research design also limits our ability to distinguish situational adaptation in conduct and the strategic deployment of legal claims from durable recalibration of participants’ understandings of legality. Future research could extend this work through comparative and longitudinal designs, ethnographic approaches to everyday legal practice, and greater attention to institutional actors such as judges and civil servants.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Maartje van der Woude, Janine Janssen, Mette-Louise Eskildsen Johansen, Bastiaan Rijpkema, and the participants of the 2025 Annual VSR Conference for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Financial Support
This contribution is part of the larger project Crafting Resilience, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under the Dutch Research Agenda – Research along Routes by Consortia (NWA-ORC) 2020/21, grant number NWA.1389.20.205. This funding supported the research conducted by Anne Jonker.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
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