✴ AppendixAttribution
Sources & Attribution
This guide is deliberate about what it borrows and what it claims. External frameworks are presented on their own terms and credited here. Everything else — the categories, instruments, and doctrine — is original to this publication and its canon.
External frameworks the guide presents
The network state framework
Balaji Srinivasan · The Network State · 2022 · thenetworkstate.com
The one-sentence network state definition, the fuller canonical definition, and the four-stage progression — startup society → network union → network archipelago → network state — presented in Chapter 02 and Chapter 06 are the original formulation from this work, including the concepts of moral innovation, national consciousness, the recognized founder, and the on-chain census. Where the guide extends or departs from that formulation — the broader threshold set, the network polity category, the two-axis maturity model — the departure is stated in the chapter text rather than blended in silently.
The classical statehood criteria
Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States · 1933 · Article 1
The four criteria that anchor serious statehood discussion — a permanent population, a defined territory, government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states — derive from the Montevideo Convention, and inform the treatment of statehood in Chapter 01 and sovereignty in Chapter 03. The guide treats these as influential rather than final: as Chapter 01 notes, recognition, effective control, independence, and legitimacy still matter in practice, and legal traditions weigh them differently.
General political vocabulary
Common ground of political theory and international law
The working definitions of nation, state, country, government, polity, autonomy, jurisdiction, and recognition in Chapter 01 state common ground rather than one scholar's system, and the chapters flag where scholars genuinely disagree. A fuller scholarly source pass — direct citations for contested definitions — remains on the editorial backlog and will be added to this page as it lands.
Original to this publication
The following categories, instruments, and formulations are original to The Sovereign Frontier and the Firma canon it publishes. They are working doctrine — held provisionally, and amended only explicitly:
- Settlemint — the settlement-maturity category, and the distinction between political emergence and settlement maturity (Chapters 04–07).
- Realm, District, Constellation — as used in the architecture of place (Chapter 07).
- The proof discipline — claim / signal / evidence / repetition / reliability / institution, the proof matrix, and the evidence ledger (Chapter 05, Standard ST-02).
- The Authority and Autonomy Profile and the language ladder — capacity → control → autonomy → authority → jurisdiction → sovereignty (Chapter 03, Standard ST-01).
- The frontier and the reach, sovereign infrastructure, and the edge thesis (Chapter 08).
- Firmamint, the Settlemint Stack, and the named protocols — the proposed Firma architecture, always marked by maturity status (Volume III).
All plates and illustrations are original works in the ATX Settlemint design treatment, created for this publication.
The editorial rule
Chapter text is imported from the publication's editorial canon through a controlled pipeline — nothing publishes without review, and doctrine is never rewritten in transit. External frameworks are represented accurately on their own terms before the guide responds to them. Proposed systems are labeled proposed. Where evidence is thin, the text says so.
Function is canonical. Implementation is provisional.