Overview

In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia marked the end of the Thirty Years' War - an event in which Catholics and Protestants had clashed across Northern Europe. The settlement not only ended the conflict but made sovereign nation states a permanent fixture in our world. It was a solution in which everyone agreed that what nation states do internally is their own business. Sovereign nation states are human technologies that were designed to facilitate the peaceful organisation of human beings, solving for their ideological, political and religious differences. However, they are technologies that are almost 380 years old and, like all technology of that era, perhaps not the optimal solutions available today. Can we not do better? We believe that we can. Our solution will involve taking a deep dive into developments like blockchain technologies and smart contracts and showing how they can be productively applied to the project of cooperative human governance.

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9783952627518

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Reviews

""Farewell to Westphalia presents a vision for decentralised, blockchain-based governance to enable self-sovereign communities and is a nod to the real-world 'crypto city' experiments in cryptocurrency communities. Importantly, it also acknowledges some of the challenges of fostering a culture of responsibility within blockchain communities and the limitations of enforcing societal order through computational means.""- Dr Kelsie Nabben (Research Fellow, RMIT University) ""It's a compelling manifesto on the future of governance. A critique of the nation-state and a visionary look into blockchain-based political systems [. . .] It's mind boggling how well-researched and multidisciplinary it is.""- Frederico Ast (Kleros Founder) ""Farewell to Westphalia makes crystal clear that the nation state is no longer the best governance system for today's digital society. More important than formulating the problem is to develop an alternative societal governance system that serves citizens, and this is exactly the main strength of the book. It imagines a future society built on blockchain technology, creating what is desperately needed today: a human society.""- Bob de Wit (Society 4.0 author and Emeritus Professor of Strategic Leadership, Nyenrode University)

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