The Ungovernable
Pattern
Nine peoples. Five continents. One political architecture.
Why the peoples who refuse empires keep inventing the same governance structure.
The Amazigh of Morocco elect a chief annually and rotate power between clans. The Haudenosaunee of North America give clan mothers the authority to remove chiefs. The Pashtun of Afghanistan make decisions by assembly where every adult male has a voice. The Mongols elected even Genghis Khan.
None of these peoples learned from each other. The Amazigh and the Haudenosaunee have never met. The Pashtun and the Mapuche share no ancestor for 50,000 years. The Roma and the Sámi occupy opposite ends of the European continent with no historical contact.
Yet all nine peoples in this dataset invented the same political architecture: assembly governance, rotating or removable leadership, customary law parallel to state law, confederation for war that dissolves in peace. All nine span multiple modern states. All nine survived empires that tried to assimilate them. All nine were called "ungovernable" by the empires that failed. None of them consider themselves ungovernable. They are self-governing.
This is convergent political evolution. The same pressures — mountain terrain, desert, steppe, or mobility — produce the same governance structure, independently, across five continents. The terrain that resists empires produces the same answer every time: the assembly, the removable leader, the customary law, and the refusal to centralise.
Same structure, different names
Eight features. Independently invented.
These structural parallels were not borrowed, transmitted, or inherited. They were independently developed by peoples with no contact, on different continents, in different millennia. The pattern is convergent — the same pressures produce the same solutions.
The landscape that resists empires
Every people in this dataset occupies terrain that makes centralisation physically impossible — or, in the case of the Roma, substitutes mobility for terrain. The political structure is not a failure to build a state. It is an adaptation to a landscape where a state would be inefficient, fragile, or simply impossible to enforce.
Vertical terrain fragments invading forces. Each valley becomes a fortress. Supply lines fail. Armies that conquer the valley floor cannot hold the peaks.
Distance and aridity exhaust supply lines. No roads. No water for occupying armies. The people who know the wells control the terrain.
Flat and vast. Mobile populations simply move away from invading armies. Cavalry-based societies outrun infantry. No fixed point to capture.
Cold, dark, treeless. No agriculture possible. Only reindeer herding works. States cannot settle populations there. The indigenous economy is the only viable economy.
Visibility near zero. Ambush terrain. Settled populations can disperse into the woods and reform elsewhere. Colonial armies cannot bring artillery through the canopy.
When the terrain doesn't resist the state, the people move through the state. Mobility replaces geography. The parallel legal system replaces the parallel terrain.
When the pattern surfaces
Self-governing, not ungovernable
The French called the Amazigh highlands bled es-siba — "land of dissidence." The British called the Pashtun tribal areas "ungovernable." The Spanish fought the Mapuche for 342 years and could not explain why they would not submit. The Romans called the peoples beyond their borders "barbarians" — from the same root that gives us "Berber."
The word "ungovernable" is always applied by the empire that fails to govern. It is never used by the people themselves. What the empire sees as disorder, the people experience as order — an order older than the empire, adapted to terrain the empire cannot hold, and governed by laws the empire cannot read because they were never written down.
The jemaa, the jirga, the kurultai, the Grand Council, the siida, the Kris, the rewe — these are all the same structure. An assembly of equals. A leader who serves at the pleasure of the governed. A legal code enforced by community consensus, not by police. A system that confederates for war and dissolves in peace, preventing military power from becoming political power.
This structure was not transmitted. There is no ur-source, no proto-democracy that radiated outward. These peoples invented it independently because the conditions demanded it. Mountain terrain fragments power. Desert exhausts it. Steppe dissolves it. Mobility evades it. In every case, the people who live in the landscape that empires cannot hold arrive at the same answer: govern yourselves, trust the assembly, limit the leader, and keep moving.
Two hundred million people live inside this pattern today. It is older than Athens. It is older than Rome. It may be older than agriculture. And it is, in every measurable way, a more durable political technology than the centralised state — because every empire in the timeline above has fallen, and every people in the dataset above is still here.
Hart, D.M. (2000). Tribe and Society in Rural Morocco. Frank Cass.
Hoffman, K.E. & Miller, S.G. (2010). Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib. Indiana University Press.
Van Bruinessen, M. (1992). Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan. Zed Books.
Weatherford, J. (2004). Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Crown.
Johansen, B.E. (1998). Debating Democracy: Native American Legacy of Freedom. Clear Light Publishers.
Henriksen, J.B. (2008). Key Principles in Implementing ILO Convention No. 169. International Labour Organization.
Barfield, T. (2010). Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. Princeton University Press.
Dillehay, T.D. (2007). Monuments, Empires, and Resistance: The Araucanian Polity and Ritual Narratives. Cambridge University Press.
Hancock, I. (2002). We are the Romani People. University of Hertfordshire Press.
Keenan, J. (2004). The Lesser Gods of the Sahara: Social Change and Contested Terrain Amongst the Tuareg. Frank Cass.
Clastres, P. (1987). Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Zone Books.
Scott, J.C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.
Special reference: Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (1974) — argued that statelessness is not a failure of political development but an active, conscious rejection of centralised power. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) — documented how highland peoples across Southeast Asia deliberately chose political structures that resisted state incorporation. Both works provide the theoretical framework for understanding the pattern documented here.
Sources: Hart (2000), Van Bruinessen (1992), Weatherford (2004), Johansen (1998), Barfield (2010), Dillehay (2007), Hancock (2002), Keenan (2004), Clastres (1987), Scott (2009) · © Dancing with Lions