The nation-state is ill-equipped to deal with global crises—but proposed alternatives, ranging from empires to new settlements on the oceans or other planets, are fantastical or dystopian (Bell 2020; Slobodian 2023; Seasteading Institute 2025). They also ignore the reality that people based in places with low population densities have constantly innovated with alternatives to the nation-state. Sub-Saharan West Africa provides a significant context where low population density provided people with an “exit option” from any political organization.

In 1830, many people escaping enslavement and war came together to establish Abeokuta, now a city in present-day Nigeria. Abeokuta was a polity rather than a state: a constituted political community that flourished despite not exercising a monopoly on violence over its subject population or attaining international recognition of its sovereignty. Abeokuta is a powerful example of bottom-up polity formation that counters the prevalence of top-down studies of how polities have formed and will change (Herbst 2014; Candido 2022). The polity attracted over 100,000 settlers.

It is predicted that by 2050, half of the world’s population growth will be concentrated in nine countries, of which five are African, including Nigeria (United Nations 2024). The prevalent framework for scholarship and policymaking in Africa is “state failure”, attributed to precolonial institutions, extractive industries, and European colonialism (Green 2019). This paradigm is itself Eurocentric (Niang 2018; Mbembe 2019). Abeokuta, with its abundant sources for the past 200 years, offers a unique case study for how people formed a legal order and complex economy that diverged from the state model.

The project realizes ISRF goals by providing a new, Africa-centred interdisciplinary method to investigate how people form and maintain legitimate and long-lasting polities. African Polity suggests that these existed in the past and are recoverable in our present.