In 2015, an image of a boy circulated all around the world. He was an ordinary boy, but his circumstances had made him anything but. His red shirt was soaked, his shoes still velcroed tightly, and his puny arms flat against the ground. Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian boy, lay dead on the Turkish beach after a failed attempt by his family to reach Europe from Turkey amid a refugee crisis. He died because the nation-state system in its entirety had failed him. No summits, human rights conferences, or conventions could provide the child with a safe space to live. Several world leaders expressed their grief. And, countless discussions were held to question what that reality truly meant for humanity. But the system producing that grief never changed.Benedict Anderson has claimed that no nation has ever existed. What has existed, and continues to exist, is not a nation-state system as we know it: borders, flags, currencies, and anthems, but only communities of people persuaded by shared language, common cultural practices, and age-old tales to feel themselves a nation. “It is imagined,” Anderson writes, “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” In such a society, the concept of in-groups and out-groups plays a pivotal role. Citizens pledge their loyalty not to the formal name of their country, but to the oneness and unity it creates for the people who associate with the term.The German soldier who died in the trenches of the First World War did not surrender his life out of a biological conflict or geographical necessity. He died for a story, and an intangible reality, narrated eloquently enough to disguise it as an inevitable battle for a sovereign identity. Anderson traces the technological prerequisite of this condition to the print revolution and its later evolution into a form of capitalism. The mass production of books created a shared pool for ideas, notions, and discussions. What was initially inaccessible to most people quickly became an open forum for all sorts of debates. Ideas and reforms eventually assumed a radical front, along with an incessant desire to find brotherhood in the grief and joy that united the proletariat. The daily newspaper, he argued for instance, became a sacred ritual that corroborated their membership of an imagined community. This observation indicates that the nation-state is not a product of human nature but rather of human technology. And, when human technology changes, the nation follows.Anderson also identified an increasingly relevant phenomenon today: nationalism spreads by modular replication. The concept of a nation, once invented, becomes a political template available for use by any community at any point in time. Therefore, the semantics of nationalism everywhere branch into the same kind of flow chart, changed only according to local context. It includes the appeal to an authentic people, an existential enemy, an abandoned heritage, and corrupted elites. This blueprint has been adopted even in contemporary world politics, and continues to exist at this very moment across the globe. But, then, the question arises: is local context the only choice for filling this blueprint? In Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, the central argument is that globalisation occurs through intersecting “scapes” of people, technology, media, finance, and ideologies that transcend borders with a velocity no singular nation-state can control.In the 1970s, the majority of international transactions were related to trade or long-term investments. But in 2025, the global foreign exchange averaged around $9.6 trillion per day. These transactions functioned through electronic systems that are bound by little to no restrictions and answer to no democratic authority. When Appadurai wrote of a financial landscape that exceeded state control, this is precisely what he was describing. The nation’s ability to regulate, distribute, and redistribute forms its structural architecture and depends greatly on its capacity to direct economic activity within its territory. But that capacity is being compromised more with each passing day.On the other hand, the print and media domain is evolving in an unforeseen manner. Print is no longer unified, and instead, people now have access to media curated precisely to support their existing beliefs. This has caused an immensely detrimental impact on political discourse globally. In 2016, the Oxford Internet Institute documented how computational propaganda, including automated accounts and targeted content was used during national elections in at least seventeen countries. This violated sovereignty was not territorial. It was epistemic. The general public was robbed of its ability to form its own evidence-based opinions. And, when misinformation is fed to citizens of the same country, there begins to grow a community that imagines itself as irreconcilable and incompatible fragments. This is the predicament that Anderson described, and Appadurai explained.What happens, then, if the unity of a nation collapses? The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s exhibited that structural failure of the state caused by extreme ethnicism, paired with economic backsliding, resulted in unprecedented disasters, including a war that lasted almost a decade, and more than 130,000 deaths. Other similar historical observations tell us that when the foundation of a nation, the collective conjecture of a common identity, erodes, there is no longer even an imagined concept of a nation-state.This is why Appadurai’s notion of “production of locality” becomes a key tool for governing bodies to evade the forces that threaten to dissolve them. Appadurai argues that, amidst globalisation, communities do not passively receive foreign influences. They actively work to produce and maintain their existing local identities in pursuit of upholding their familiar and coherent social worlds. But when the effort is overtaken by ethnonationalist groups and the need for belonging assumes the face of minority and migrant scapegoating, it becomes a weapon for socio-political destruction instead of a preservation mechanism. In this context, the Brexit vote was a significant action of locality production and an assertion against the perceived homogenization in Europe.Another area for concern includes climate change. In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its Sixth Assessment Report, stating that the warming of the climate system was unequivocal and human influence was the dominant cause. The architecture of any nation-state is structurally incapable of responding to such a crisis independently. The Paris Agreement of 2015, established to address this issue and celebrated as a global commitment to preserving the environment, proved to be a failure.The Climate Action Tracker found that if all nations met their Paris commitments, a condition far from guaranteed, the world would still warm by approximately 2.4 degrees Celsius, well beyond the threshold the agreement itself identified as dangerous. The third key concern is migration. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2023 reported that the total number of people forcibly displaced worldwide exceeded 110 million. The nation-state’s response to this catastrophe has been in deportation and detention. But these methods don’t solve the challenge. They are merely an expression of administrative and moral failure.In the foreseeable future, the nation-state will not disappear immediately because its emotional and identity-based hold on people globally remains significant, and the alternative governance structures remain insufficient for complete replacement. But it has become glaringly evident that the nation-state system cannot adequately address pressing grievances. Anderson rightly expressed that national communities have always been imagined and political boundaries were never solidified by nature and rather, only by human decisions. So, the possibility of reform depends on our ability to redraw political boundaries and reimagine what it means to be a human, and not merely a citizen of a specific nation. After all, the nation-state itself was once an improbable invention. And perhaps, Alan Kurdi’s story should be far more compelling for us to take action than any tale of national identity.
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.