A micronation is a political entity whose representatives claim that they belong to an independent nation or sovereign state, but which lacks legal recognition by any sovereign state. Micronations are classified separately from de facto states and quasi-states; they are also not considered to be autonomous or self-governing as they lack the legal basis in international law for their existence. The activities of micronations are almost always trivial enough to be ignored rather than disputed by the established nations whose territory they claim—referred to in micronationalism as macronations. Several micronations have issued coins, flags, postage stamps, passports, medals and other state-related items, some as a source of revenue. Motivations for the creation of micronations include theoretical experimentation, political protest, artistic expression, personal entertainment and the conduct of criminal activity. The study of micronationalism is known as micropatriology or micropatrology.
MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker, after which it has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software. MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second. Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest and most visited websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 400 languages. The software has more than 1,000 configuration settings and more than 1,800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. Besides its usage on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on websites such as Fandom, wikiHow and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia.
Micronations are ephemeral, self-proclaimed entities that claim to be independent sovereign states, but which are not acknowledged as such by any recognised sovereign state, or by any supranational organisation. The constant reiteration of the flag as a symbol of a something that exists by the entity that it symbolizes confirms the validity of the flag as an officially sanctioned and/or definitive symbol of an entity; therefore, there has been a close association between vexillology/vexillogic imagination in creating visual symbols that appear to legitimize micronational claims.
Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations is an Australian gazetteer about micronations, published in September 2006 by Lonely Planet. It was written by John Ryan, George Dunford and Simon Sellars. Self-described as a humorous guidebook and written in a light-hearted tone, the book's profile of micronations offers information on their flags, leaders, currencies, maps and other facts. It was re-subtitled Guide to Self-Proclaimed Nations in later publications.
Akhzivland is a micronation between Nahariya and the Lebanese border on the Israeli west coast, founded by Eli Avivi in 1971. The micronation is promoted by the Israel Ministry of Tourism.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
The Grand Duchy of Flandrensis is a micronation with claims over some territories of Antarctica, which was founded in 2008 by the Belgian Niels Vermeersch. Flandrensis is not recognised by any country or government, nor is it their intention to get diplomatic recognition. Since 2021 the micronation is registered in Belgium as the environmental non-profit organization “vzw Groothertogdom Flandrensis”.
Sir Aubrey (Hunt) de Vere, 2nd Baronet was an Anglo-Irish poet and landowner.
MicroCon is a biennial summit or conference of micronationalists held in every other year since April 11, 2015. The event was created by Kevin Baugh of the Republic of Molossia, and every summit since has been hosted by a different micronation. MicroCon is a significant event in the micronational community, serving as a venue for exchanging ideas between micronationalists. The event has also been compared to the micronational equivalent of a session of the United Nations General Assembly. The largest edition, MicroCon 2019 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, had 113 attendees from 43 micronations. MicroCon 2023 was the first edition to consist of two separate events: an American summit in Joliet, Illinois, and a European summit in Ypres, Belgium.
An aquapelago is an assemblage of marine and terrestrial elements in which the aquatic spaces are key to community livelihoods and to communities’ senses of identity and belonging. Aquapelago refers to the socially constructed spaces of island, coastal, lacustrine or riverine locations, where humans have developed particularly concentrated engagements with the marine environment for their livelihoods or leisure. A neologism, aquapelago denotes the manner in which environmental psychology has been key to various maritime communities and causes in recent years. For example, the famous Mabo decision on indigenous Australian native title in 1992, successfully argued that areas of the seabed, and the aquatic resources above them, were part of traditional Torres Strait Islander community territories and related senses of communal homelands.
In modern Japanese folklore since the mid-2000s, the Ningen (ニンゲン) is an aquatic humanoid whale-like creature supposedly inhabiting the subantarctic oceans. It was invented by Japanese internet users.
The Principality of Snake Hill, also known simply as Snake Hill is a self-proclaimed independent sovereign state (micronation), located near Mudgee in New South Wales, Australia. Snake Hill has roughly hundreds of citizens, and claims land the size of Monaco. Snake Hill claimed independence on 2 September 2003, and Princess Paula claimed it was a right to secede, citing "The U.S., as you well know, seceded from England in 1776, It’s a remedial right, a last resort."
The Antarctic Micronational Union (AMU) is an intermicronational organization that aims to regulate micronational claims in Antarctica. The purpose of the AMU is to protect the claims of its members against other claimants.
Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty is a 2021 book by Australian constitutional law specialists Harry Hobbs and George Williams about micronations and their legal status. Written from an academic perspective, it is one of few works on micronational movements and the earliest-published book to focus largely on the legal aspect of micronations. The book concerns the definition of statehood, the place of micronations within international law, people's motivations for declaring them, the micronational community and the ways by which such entities mimic sovereign states. In 2022 Hobbs and Williams published a book for a broader audience, How to Rule Your Own Country: The Weird and Wonderful World of Micronations.
The International Micropatrological Society (IMS) was an American learned society and research institute dedicated to the study of micronations. Founded in 1973 by Frederick W. Lehmann IV of St. Louis, Missouri, the IMS coined micropatrology as the study of micronations and micronationalism. It had documented 128 micronations and similar political entities by 1976.
How to Rule Your Own Country: The Weird and Wonderful World of Micronations is a 2022 book by Australian lawyers and legal academics Harry Hobbs and George Williams about micronationalism—exploring several micronations and their motivations for declaring independence. The book gives an overview on the topic of micronationalism and explores numerous micronations, extant and defunct, as well as their motivations for declaring sovereignty. An overarching theme is the disproportionate number of micronations located within Australia. How to Rule Your Own Country is a follow-up to Hobbs' and Williams' more academic 2021 work Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty.
Harry Hobbs is an Australian lawyer and legal academic who specialises in Australian constitutional law. An associate professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Technology Sydney, Hobbs has published numerous works regarding the legal rights of Aboriginal Australians within Australia, micronations, and secessionism in Australia. He has collaborated with lawyer George Williams on several occasions.
How to Start Your Own Country is an American non-fiction book written by Erwin S. Strauss about micronationalism, particularly its application to libertarianism and individualism. Strauss, who holds libertarian views, believes in the abolition of the power of the state. In How to Start Your Own Country, Strauss introduces five approaches that micronations may take in an attempt to achieve statehood, and documents various micronations and their mostly unsuccessful attempts at seceding. The first book published about micronations, How to Start Your Own Country was published in 1979, with subsequent editions in 1984 by Loompanics and in 1999 by Paladin Press. The book was well-received by critics.
Although the academic study of micronations—known as micropatriology—is limited, there have nevertheless been a number of published works on the subject. The following is a list documenting these written works. This list does not contain works wherein micronationalism is the secondary theme, such as reference works which contain or make references to micronations and books about individual micronations.
