'The Cinderella Stamps and Philatelic Practices of Micronations: The Materiality of Claims to Statehood' by
Harry Hobbs and Jessie Hohmann in (2024)
London Review of International Law (forthcoming) comments
When non-state entities design, issue and use their own postage stamps, they visibly harness the symbolism and trappings of statehood that stamps carry. Drawing on the international legal regulation of postage stamps, this article makes a close examination of micronations’ stamps as objects of international law, to consider how the philatelic practices of micronations illuminate material practices of sovereignty and statehood.
As a ‘small but mighty symbolic emissary from one particular nation to the rest of the world...the postage stamp is an excellent vehicle for spurious, tenuous, or completely fictitious states to declare their existence’.
In May 2022, the first author of this article received a parcel. The brown A4 envelope (see figure 1) was laden with a diverse collection of stamps labelled with the mysterious country of the Sultanate of Occussi-Ambeno. The collection of stamps was a window into the Sultanate, its relations with its neighbours and its values. Stamps celebrated forty-five years of independence of a political community called Mevu, fifty years of Occussi-Ambeno’s own independence, the 60th anniversary of the first human space flight, the centenary of Tibet’s independence, and ‘Ten Fun Years of Peppa Pig’. The envelope was postmarked 15 March 2022 by the Sultanate’s Chadwick Post Office. It also bore two New Zealand Stamps.
Occussi-Ambeno is not a recognised state. It is a ‘micronation’ – a self-declared state. Nominally located on the territory of East Timor the Sultanate is in fact led by Bruce Grenville, an imaginative, Auckland-based anarchist. Micronations perform and mimic acts of sovereignty and adopt many protocols associated with statehood (including issuing stamps), but micronations lack a foundation in law for their claims. Occussi-Ambeno may appear to have a post office and a wonderfully creative set of postage stamps, but it has no independent existence in international law. And while the stamps issued by Occussi-Ambeno appear compellingly stamp-like, they are better understood as ‘cinderellas’. This is the term used in philatelic circles to refer to objects that resemble postage stamps but are ‘not issued for postal purposes by a government postal administration’. These little fragments of adhesive paper may have an ‘extraordinary ability to conjure an entire nation on a tiny piece of paper’, but the postage stamps of micronations remain formally stickers, not stamps.
Cinderella stamps are to stamps what micronations are to states. They are parasitic on the accepted contours of an existing entity but have not undergone the alchemical process that turns in one case, an adhesive sticker into a stamp, and in the other, a constellation of power into a state. In this paper, we explore the stamps and philatelic practices of micronations as a parallel process that seeks to harness (at small and large scale) the constitutive power of international law to make the objects around us into recognisable forms and confer on them legal status and power.
We situate this paper within the unfolding international legal scholarship that recognises both images and objects as an important focus of study. More specifically we explore the relationship between international law and the material culture that has shaped, vested and recorded international law and international legal practice. Stamps, as objects of international law, are both structured by international law and help to consolidate its doctrines, (especially, from our perspective, sovereignty and statehood) through their circulation and design. At the same time, however, they demonstrate the resistant potential of objects, in that they can be read and viewed, sent and received, in subversive and destabilising ways that demonstrate the absurdity of international law’s central precepts and preoccupations.
Our paper is divided into five parts. After further situating our approach within the material turn in international legal scholarship (B), we provide a brief explanation for how micronations, and stamps are regulated in international law (C). Then, to probe how stamps (and micronations) both complicate and illuminate international legal doctrines of sovereignty and statehood, we map out several ways in which they appear as international law’s objects (D). Mindful that the stamps and philatelic practices of micronations defy easy categorisation, we nevertheless distil four distinct practices. First, in section (a) we outline how stamps are constituted by international law as a manifestation of sovereignty under the Universal Postal Union (UPU). This sets the background and context against which the stamps and philatelic practices of micronations appear. In a series of vignettes that highlight the philatelic practices of micronations, we look at how micronations issue and employ stamps as (b) a presentation of sovereignty, (c) a means to bolster claims or to advertise sovereignty; and finally, (d) a critique or protest of sovereignty and statehood.
