KEY FINDINGS
- The sovereign citizen movement has spread from the United States to more than 26 countries globally. Covid restrictions and digital networks accelerated its growth and created dangerous intersections with other conspiracy movements.
- The sovereign citizen movement has grown beyond a nuisance and into an escalating national security challenge for many countries around the world.
- The transnational threat of the movement requires multilateral intelligence coordination, online interventions targeting influencers, and globally informed threat assessments.
The sovereign citizen movement has become an escalating national security challenge, which requires a coordinated global response, according to a new Lowy Institute Policy Brief.
The movement emerged in the United States in the 1960s with a belief system based on the rejection of government authority, pseudo-legal arguments, and various conspiracy theories, but now has a presence in more than 26 countries, according to the report’s authors Lydia Khalil and Keiran Hardy.
They argue it is wrong to dismiss sovereign citizens as eccentrics who are not dangerous.
“The sovereign citizens movement has grown beyond a nuisance and into an escalating national security challenge for many countries around the world,” they write.
“Sovereign citizens have promoted delegitimising narratives against democracies, created alternative structures of authority, committed acts of political violence, fomented civil unrest, engaged in violent confrontations with law enforcement, and threatened elected officials and high office holders.
“There are increasing incidents of sovereign citizens engaging in terrorist attacks, plots, and acts of violence directed towards government officials as well as instigations of civil unrest” — including in Australia, Germany, the United States, and Canada.
“The shooting of two Australian police officers in regional Victoria in August 2025 and many more attacks against police in the United States illustrate how encounters between sovereign citizens and law enforcement can turn deadly.”
The report says addressing the transnational threat posed by the movement requires more structured international law enforcement and intelligence coordination to track sovereign citizens, more targeted online interventions to prevent extremist narratives and networks from spreading, and better training resources and protocols to help authorities to anticipate domestic threats.
The report is part of the Lowy Institute’s Changing Violent Extremism Threat Landscape Project, funded by the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
Read the full Lowy Institute Policy Brief, The global sovereign citizen movement