Collective Defense
Security Without the State
"Without government, who will defend us?" This is perhaps the most common objection to stateless society—and one of the easiest to answer. Voluntary societies can defend themselves far more effectively than states can, for reasons both economic and strategic. This page explains why stateless defense is not only possible but superior to state militarism.
The key insight: the best defense strategy is avoiding conflict in the first place. Anarchist societies excel at this because they remove the perverse incentives that make states aggressively violent. When defense is truly defensive—protecting actual people and property rather than political interests—it becomes both more effective and far less costly.
Why States Are Aggressive
The most important factor in decisions about war is cost-benefit analysis. If a potential war provides little benefit to decision-makers and costs them significantly, it's unlikely to happen. States, however, have deeply perverse incentives that make them prone to aggression.
The State's War Incentives:
- Politicians don't pay the costs: Wars are funded by taxpayers who have no choice in the matter. Decision-makers send other people's children to fight and spend other people's money.
- War profiteers benefit enormously: The military-industrial complex—suppliers of weapons, vehicles, equipment, and services—makes fortunes from war. These industries lobby aggressively for military spending and foreign intervention.
- Political power increases: War consolidates state power, suppresses dissent, and allows leaders to claim emergency authority.
- No accountability for failure: Politicians who start catastrophic wars rarely face consequences. They're protected by the state apparatus they control.
These incentives explain why states engage in endless wars despite overwhelming costs in lives, wealth, and stability. The people making decisions don't bear the consequences—so they make terrible decisions.
Why Stateless Societies Are Peaceful
Stateless societies flip these incentives entirely. Those who would choose war must fund it themselves, making aggression far less attractive.
Advantages of Stateless Defense:
- Defense is cheaper than offense: What's needed for effective defense—decentralized response, local knowledge, defensive positions—costs far less than projecting power abroad.
- No central target: Without a state apparatus to capture, there's no command center an invader can take over to control the population. Conquest must happen neighborhood by neighborhood, making it prohibitively expensive.
- No extraction apparatus: Even if an invader conquers territory, they must build entirely new infrastructure to extract resources. There's no pre-existing tax system to hijack.
- No geopolitical rivalry: Stateless societies don't engage in power games with foreign governments. They have no standing armies, present no threat, and give foreign states no reason to feel challenged.
- Moral high ground: Invading a peaceful, stateless society is obviously unjust, undermining the aggressor state's legitimacy in the eyes of its own subjects.
Making Invasion Costly
While stateless societies are unlikely targets, it would be naive to assume they'll never face threats. The solution is making aggression as costly as possible for would-be invaders—without creating a standing army that itself becomes a threat to freedom.
Decentralized Defense Networks
Instead of a single military hierarchy, stateless societies would have multiple competing protection agencies, armed citizens, and voluntary militia. This decentralization makes conquest extremely difficult:
- No single point of failure—defeating one agency doesn't control the territory
- Local knowledge and defensive advantages
- Flexibility and adaptation rather than rigid command structures
- Guerrilla tactics and asymmetric warfare favor defenders
Economic Resistance
Protection agencies and market entities can make invasion economically ruinous:
- Bounties on aggressor leadership: Rather than fighting soldiers, place bounties on the politicians and generals who order invasion. This encourages insurrection and makes decision-makers personally vulnerable.
- Reward desertion: Offer sanctuary and payment to enemy soldiers who defect, especially if they bring weapons or intelligence with them.
- Welcome invaders economically: Local businesses, having no patriotic allegiance to a non-existent state, can welcome foreign soldiers as customers—blurring the line between occupation and immigration.
- Target decision-makers, not populations: Make it clear that retaliation focuses on leaders who ordered aggression, not on enemy civilians or conscripts.
This approach—targeting leadership while offering peaceful alternatives to soldiers—creates powerful disincentives for war while maintaining ethical high ground.
The Assassination Politics Concept
Protection agencies, already skilled at apprehending people, would be well-positioned to credibly threaten or execute strikes against aggressor leadership. When politicians know their heads are on the line—not just soldiers' and taxpayers'—they're far less likely to order invasions.
This isn't about glorifying violence. It's about shifting risk back to decision-makers where it belongs. States make war cheap for leaders and expensive for everyone else. Voluntary defense makes it expensive for leaders and cheaper for everyone else.
Historical Evidence
These aren't just theoretical ideas. History provides evidence that stateless or minimally-armed societies can persist peacefully:
- Countries without militaries: There are currently 16 countries with no military forces whatsoever, including Costa Rica and Liechtenstein (which abolished its military in 1868). These nations aren't constantly invaded despite lacking defense forces.
- Stateless societies: The historical examples covered on the Anarchy Examples page—medieval Iceland, Somali Xeer, Irish Brehon Law—successfully defended themselves for centuries without state militaries.
- Small states vs. stateless regions: Weak states with established government apparatus make more attractive targets than stateless regions with decentralized defense. An invader can capture a weak state's command structure; they can't do the same with a network.
Addressing Common Objections
What about ideological or religious motivations for war?
Stateless societies eliminate many ideological triggers for conflict. Without a government to engage in disputes with foreign states, there's no entity to offend or challenge foreign powers. Individual hostility is far less threatening to states than government hostility. Additionally, the obvious injustice of attacking a peaceful, non-threatening society undermines the aggressor's legitimacy.
Couldn't major powers just nuke stateless regions?
Technically yes—but they could also nuke other states, and would have more reason to do so. Nuking a stateless region offers no strategic gain, creates environmental damage that affects the aggressor, and would be seen as monstrously unjust by the aggressor's own population, destroying internal legitimacy. The same logic applies to any overwhelming force: using it against peaceful, non-threatening populations is politically costly even for tyrants.
Wouldn't competing protection agencies fight each other?
Competition doesn't mean conflict. Agencies that gain reputations for starting fights lose customers. Those that resolve disputes peacefully and protect clients effectively gain market share. The incentive structure favors cooperation and arbitration, not warfare. See Beyond State Solutions for more on how competing agencies resolve disputes.
What about coordination in large-scale defense?
Coordination emerges voluntarily when needed. Protection agencies have strong incentives to cooperate against external threats—all their business depends on successfully defending their territory. Historical examples show voluntary coordination works: medieval Iceland's thing system, Swiss cantonal militias, and countless examples of voluntary collective defense throughout history. The difference is voluntary cooperation vs. forced hierarchy.
The Bottom Line
Stateless societies face drastically lower defense needs than states. They're less likely to be attacked, and when threatened, decentralized defense is more effective than centralized militaries. The market provides superior protection services because providers must satisfy customers to survive—unlike state militaries that face no competition and serve political rather than defensive purposes.
In effect, the defense problem largely solves itself when the state apparatus is dissolved. The incentives for aggression disappear, the perverse motivations that fuel war vanish, and what remains is genuine defensive capability based on voluntary cooperation and market efficiency.
Should invasion occur despite these factors, competing protection services and market entities would respond effectively—not because of centralized command, but because defending their customers is literally their business model. When compared to the bloated, inefficient, politically-captured defense establishments of states, voluntary defense is both more ethical and more effective.
Continue Your Journey
Curious why even successful stateless societies eventually fell to state power? Read Downfall of the Greats for historical analysis.
Want to see other voluntary alternatives to state services? Return to Beyond State Solutions.
Ready to build the alternative? Visit The Agora to participate in the counter-economy today.