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, designed to facilitate the peaceful organisation of human beings and 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 involves diving deep into developments like blockchain technologies and smart contracts, and showing how they can be productively applied to cooperative human governance.

We believe – and Farewell to Westphalia argues – that decentralised communities and blockchain governance (at every level) are not only feasible but are on the immediate horizon. Furthermore, the seeds have already been planted. Logos' aim is to nurture those embryonic forms of blockchain governance and make their future adoption as frictionless as possible.

When they arrive, they will provide us relief from the failures of the Westphalian order and offer creative alternatives for humans to govern themselves in effective-yet-self-sovereign ways. We should be optimistic about the promise of these new forms of governance. After all, we have nothing to lose but the tyranny of centralised governance, its corruption, and all of its barbed wire fences.