Unrecognized Peoples

International law guarantees the right of peoples to self-determination. It is enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, in both International Covenants of 1966, in the Declaration on Friendly Relations of 1970, and in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The International Court of Justice has affirmed it as an obligation erga omnes-a norm binding upon all states without exception.

Yet international law deliberately refuses to define what constitutes "a people."

As the British constitutionalist Sir Ivor Jennings observed: "The people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people."¹ In 1998, a UNESCO expert group undertook the only serious attempt to formulate a definition-but it was never incorporated into any binding international instrument. The ambiguity remains intentional.

None of these instruments contains a definition. None establishes criteria for recognition. There exists no official register of peoples entitled to self-determination. This is not accidental. It is a deliberate choice by states-the authors and custodians of international law-designed to forestall challenges to their own sovereignty.

Were the United Nations to compile an official list of "peoples entitled to self-determination," every listed group would gain immediate legal standing to assert claims to autonomy or independence. Turkey would never consent to the inclusion of the Kurds. China would block the Tibetans and the Uyghurs. Spain would reject the Catalans. And so on.

Data sources: UNHCR Mid-Year Trends 2025; IDMC Global Report on Internal Displacement; UNHCR Statelessness Data. Realistic estimates draw on independent research by the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion and Minority Rights Group International.

Between 300 and 500 million people live outside or at the margins of the state-membership system. At the human level, this means loss of protection, access, and voice. At the legal level, it means the absence of any form of collective visibility. At the institutional level, it means the impossibility of being seen as a subject rather than a dispersed mass of individual misfortunes.

This is not a statistical abstraction. These are real people confronting concrete forms of legal vulnerability. For stateless persons, it means the inability to prove their identity, to access healthcare, education, banking, the right to work. For refugees, it means dependence on temporary status and severance from community. For peoples without a state, it means the absence of a collective voice and mechanisms of self-determination-even where members hold citizenship in another country. To the system that governs their lives, they exist only as individuals or as objects of humanitarian policy-but not as collective subjects possessing a recognized right to self-determination.

Let us state plainly what is happening. What these hundreds of millions of people face is neither an inadvertent gap nor an unavoidable consequence of global complexity. It is a deliberate refusal to grant collective recognition: despite a vast apparatus of international mechanisms for the protection of individual rights, the system intentionally withholds from unrecognized peoples the status of collective subject under international law.

This is not a matter of ignorance. It is a structurally determined refusal. The system exploits the very existence of these peoples to justify its own programs, budgets, and institutions-yet withholds from them the status of collective subject of law, because such recognition would create legal consequences for its member states.

The problem operates on three planes simultaneously, which is precisely why it cannot be solved by any single humanitarian program, any single resolution, or any single technology.

Throughout history, those who sought to demonstrate the existence of their people confronted the same barrier: creating a verified registry of millions of individuals required a central administrator. And the central administrator was always the state. First, you needed recognition from the very entity whose authority you wished to transcend. A closed loop.

That barrier has now fallen. This is the historical inflection point: the old logic demanded recognition from above; the new logic makes existence visible from below-through the verified participation of the people themselves.

Biometric verification makes it possible to confirm the uniqueness of an individual without a state-issued document. Cryptography renders the record mathematically unforgeable. DAO architecture enables millions of people to make decisions collectively-without hierarchy and without intermediaries.

All of this became technically feasible only in the last several years. None of it existed in 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted; nor in 1966, when the International Covenants were opened for signature; nor in 2007, when the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was proclaimed.

Earthlings is not ahead of its time. It operates at the first moment in history when its design became technically achievable.

A verified SBT passport on a public blockchain is not a membership card.

It is a permanent, unforgeable, publicly verifiable record of an individual's conscious choice to belong to a voluntary people. This record cannot be revoked by a government. It cannot be erased by a change in borders. It cannot be disregarded by any statistical methodology.

For the first time in history, a person-regardless of the state in which they were born, from which they were expelled, or by which they are denied recognition-can present verifiable, public, cryptographic proof that they exist as part of a voluntary, verified collective operating within the legal space that international law has deliberately left open.

And what matters here is not merely the instrument, but the principle. Earthlings is not founded on descent, blood, territory, or the accident of birth. It is founded on conscious, voluntary affiliation. This means something simple and radical: peoplehood can be not only an inheritance but a free choice.

Yet before discussing the instruments, it is necessary to name what lies behind them. For the stateless person, for the Rohingya in a camp, for the Kurd whose people are partitioned among four states and denied collective representation, the question is not purely juridical. It is a question of dignity: do you exist as a person? Are you worthy of being seen? Does your choice matter? Earthlings answers that question before any other-and answers it in the affirmative.

For a Rohingya in a camp in Bangladesh, for a Kurd partitioned among four countries, for a "non-citizen" in Latvia, for an undocumented person in Thailand-an SBT passport may be the first verified identity document in their life. Not issued by a state, but attested by a community and recorded in perpetuity.

Here is what Earthlings provides to those whom no institution has provided it before. Not a promise of salvation and not a gesture of moral support, but a working foundation: a form of belonging, coordination, and collective visibility that has simply never existed until now.

The 300 to 500 million are not a homogeneous mass. They comprise four distinct categories of people, with distinct problems and distinct needs. Earthlings offers each of them a concrete response.

But the significance of that response extends beyond the zone of distress itself. The infrastructure built for those whom the system chose to overlook also demonstrates to everyone else what a new form of belonging can look like in the twenty-first century: not imposed from above, but confirmed through participation and choice.

Stateless Persons: 15-20 Million

The Rohingya in Bangladesh. The Bidoon in Kuwait. The "non-citizens" of Latvia and Estonia. Undocumented persons in Thailand, Côte d'Ivoire, the Dominican Republic. These individuals belong to no state-literally. They hold no passport, no citizenship, often no documents whatsoever.

Refugees: ~43 Million

Syrians in Turkey and Lebanon. Ukrainians across Europe. Afghans in Pakistan and Iran. Somalis in Kenya. These individuals once held citizenship but were forced to flee their country. They live in a foreign state under temporary status, often without the right to work, to receive education in their own language, or to participate politically.

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs): ~73 Million

People forced from their homes but remaining within the borders of their own state. Ukrainians displaced within Ukraine. Syrians in Idlib. Congolese in eastern Congo. Persons from Myanmar who fled conflict zones. They remain citizens in law, but in practice have lost access to infrastructure, services, and representation.

Peoples Without a State: 200-400 Million

The Kurds. The Tibetans. The Uyghurs. The Palestinians. The Catalans. The Assyrians. The Baloch. The Tamils of Sri Lanka. Between 50 and 100 peoples that possess a language, a culture, a history, and institutions-yet lack sovereign representation in the international system. Many members of these peoples hold citizenship in the states among which they are partitioned-but as a people, they are denied collective legal personality.

Through Earthlings, unrecognized peoples can not only assert their legitimacy but render their existence publicly demonstrable. Where before they remained a subject of dispute, description, or others' statistics, a form of presence emerges that is no longer so easily reduced to abstraction.

Traditionally, a people proved its existence through territory, language, and history-and still depended on whether states chose to acknowledge it. The old logic required recognition first, and only then permitted the people to speak on its own behalf. Earthlings inverts that sequence: first, a verifiable collective presence comes into being, and then it is recognition that lags behind reality, not the other way around.

Earthlings proposes a different path: proof through participation.

Earthlings does not violate international law. It operates within a space that international law has deliberately left open.

Because the concept of "a people" is not defined in international law, there is no closed list-and consequently, there is no prohibition on new forms of peoplehood. The definition remains open rather than fixed.

Historically, international legal recognition has often followed the creation of institutional reality rather than preceding it: peoples that achieved a visible organizational form, a consistent democratic practice, and a verifiable presence created conditions under which legal recognition became politically untenable to withhold. Earthlings builds precisely that kind of reality.

Earthlings builds this institutional reality-a verified population, democratic governance, and functioning coordination-for all who need it. Without asking permission. Exercising a right that already exists.

The significance of this precedent extends beyond Earthlings itself.

Everything discussed above-the registry, the collective voice, the coordination, the recorded participation-is not a historical anomaly. It is a recurring mechanism through which new legal realities come into existence.

Historically, rights that "did not exist" in law became real when the people who possessed them became visible, organized, and impossible to ignore.

The instrument was always the same: collective, documented, undeniable presence.

If you are reading this document and feel that it speaks to you, to your people, to your situation-that is not a coincidence. Earthlings was built for you.

Joining takes a few minutes. It does not require renouncing your citizenship, national identity, or cultural heritage. It creates no obligation to any state. It means one thing: you choose to be visible-as part of a voluntary, verified, global community of people united by shared values and a shared planetary responsibility.