Cleaver, Donna
Published in National Security Journal on 20 October 2026.
DOI: 10.36878/nsj20261020.04
Download full PDF version – Below the Threshold:Sovereignism and Security Recalibration in New Zealand (537 KB)
Abstract
Sovereignist activity in New Zealand ranges from pseudolegal filings and administrative harassment to coercive encounters with officials and, on occasion, serious violence. Most manifestations occur below conventional criminal and violent-extremism thresholds, creating challenges for frameworks that principally activate around violence. Drawing upon analysis of 245 publicly available court documents and sixty Official Information Act submissions spanning 1988–2025, this article examines sovereignism as one manifestation of contemporary anti-government extremism and introduces lorefare as an exploratory concept describing the strategic deployment of sovereign doctrine, identities, pseudolegal practices and constructed institutional challenges. Situating New Zealand alongside recent recalibrations in Germany and particularly the Netherlands, the article demonstrates how graduated approaches can render persistent anti-institutional conduct analytically visible without collapsing lawful dissent into terrorism discourse. It advocates for a trajectory-aware assessment as a more proportionate means of differentiating sovereignist manifestations and identifying escalation risks before violence becomes the principal indicator of concern.
Keywords: Sovereignism; sovereign citizen, anti-government extremism;
pseudolaw; anti-institutionalism; national security; New Zealand
Introduction
On 9 March 2016, a routine cannabis eradication operation in the Bay of Plenty escalated into a 22-hour siege when Rhys Warren fired upon police officers working near his rural property.1 During the subsequent tactical breach, Warren discharged a firearm at close range, injuring multiple officers before surrendering the following day.2 At trial, he challenged the judge’s jurisdiction and asserted that the court has no legal right to govern him. When those arguments were again rejected at sentencing, Warren walked out of his own hearing.3 A court-appointed assessor noted Warren’s belief that he was being illegally detained and that both the police and justice department were conspiring against him.4 Pre-sentencing reports documented a longstanding pattern of anti-authority behaviour, including a severe assault on an elderly dog control officer in 2009.5 Post-conviction, Warren has continued to file pseudolegal documents, illustrating that sovereign anti-authority beliefs and practices may persist well beyond a single violent episode.6
The deadly element was again visible in 2025, when long-term sovereign adherent Dezi Freeman fatally shot two police officers during the execution of a warrant in rural Australia.7 Yet Warren and Freeman are not representative of the broader sovereign milieu in either country. A 2025 New Zealand media profile of a couple identifying as sovereign adherents emphasised their self-described “non-dangerous” ordinariness.8 Their refusal to pay rates or fines and their practice of unlicensed driving were framed, not as conduct subject to legitimate state enforcement, but as morally-grounded lifestyle choices that downplays foreseeable friction with authorities.9 As Rathje observes, although sovereign actors may be externally classified as extremist, many adherents frame their conduct as lawful and restorative rather than criminal.10 Nonetheless, making sense out of these beliefs and practices is a complex task.
The analytical challenge lies in the space between these poles, where sovereignist escalation seldom occurs without antecedent signals. As Sarteschi observes, available evidence suggests that sovereign violence often emerges following repeated tactical failures and increasingly adversarial encounters with law-enforcement.11 Most sovereign activity generates institutional friction well before it approaches physical violence, often through pseudolegal refusals to recognise authority, declarations of non-consent, non-payment of financial obligations, and coercive encounters with frontline workers and officials.12 While criminal conduct can be addressed through existing mechanisms, New Zealand currently lacks a dedicated formal framework for systematically assessing sovereign conduct below the threshold of violence and understanding its broader significance. Practitioners therefore often have to treat such behavior as non-compliance, regard it as unlawful but rarely prosecutable, or reach for classifications developed for materially different sovereign manifestations and threat landscapes.
This article approaches the question from a security studies perspective, alert to recurrent critiques that authorities risk over-securitising fringe opinions, dissent or mislabelling adherents. It proposes that a graduated approach, one that tracks behaviour and trajectories rather than waiting for violence, better supports security and intelligence assessments through earlier identification of escalation risks. Equally important, such an approach reduces the possibility of disproportionate responses that may counterproductively reinforce sovereign adherents’ grievances. Frameworks that rely on violence as their principal activation threshold struggle to capture coercive behaviour and cumulative institutional harms that remain below that threshold. These tensions are examined here by situating New Zealand’s experience within recent European recalibrations, particularly the Netherlands’ graduated approach to sustained anti-institutional conduct.
To further ground this analysis, pseudolaw-infused sovereignism is treated as one strand within the broader field of contemporary Anti-Government Extremism (AGE), an umbrella concept encompassing anti-authority, anti-institutional, and related manifestations. Jackson defines AGE as extremism that “primarily or consistently focuses on the government as a source or cause of perceived crisis,”13 while Bjorgo notes that anti-government actors may combine deep distrust of democratic institutions with support for, or tolerance of, violence against the democratic order.14 Positioning sovereignism within this rubric recognises its anti state nature without presuming that all sovereign conduct is violent or reducible to a single ideological category, particularly right-wing extremism (XRW).
The United States (US) remains analytically informative as an originator of sovereignist doctrine and as a point of reference for understanding variations of sovereign activity. However, applying US official designations and threat typologies uncritically to New Zealand is problematic. Labels such as sovereign citizen (SovCit) and paper terrorism emerged within a distinct constitutional and security environment shaped by diverse tax protest milieus, racialised anti-federalism, militia-adjacent mobilisations, federal land standoffs, and comparatively permissive firearms access. Although SovCit has become a convenient shorthand for diverse international manifestations, US labels still carry implicit threat assumptions heavily shaped by their American settings. While these concepts illuminate sovereign repertoires, their application to New Zealand sovereign activity requires careful contextual adaptation and should not predetermine assessments.
To illuminate the relevance of European recalibrations, this article first clarifies AGE typologies and key terminology, including pseudolaw and sovereign labelling. It then introduces lorefare as an exploratory analytical concept that captures the strategic deployment of sovereign doctrine, pseudolegal tactics, quasi-authoritative identity claims, and constructed institutional challenges without presupposing the violent absolutism often associated with US-derived labels. The article briefly traces doctrinal lineages andpandemic-era resurgence that prompted the recalibrations in Europe before considering why New Zealand frameworks struggle to address the diversity and gradients of sovereign manifestations.
Placing New Zealand developments alongside these comparative models, the article advocates for approaches capable of navigating distinctions between dissent, delegitimisation, and escalation, while remaining attentive to the friction that may, under certain conditions, precede violence. Here, delegitimisation refers not to rhetorical policy opposition but to sustained practices that deny the legal authority of democratic governance and seek to operationalise that denial through administrative campaigns, jurisdictional refusal, or the construction of parallel structures of authority. This aligns with AGE definitions emphasising persistent and structural opposition rather than intermittent or issue-specific dissent.
Empirical illustrations draw upon sixty Official Information Act (OIA) requests and associated annotations submitted between late 2020 and February 2025 to twenty-six agencies, organisations, and six government ministers through the public platform FYI.org.nz, together with 245 publicly available New Zealand court documents spanning 1988 to early 2025. These materials were selected on the basis of containing explicit sovereign pseudolaw arguments, rather than general anti-authority sentiment.15 Collectively, these materials provide a longitudinal overview into sovereign behaviours, tactical repertories, demographic patterns, and judicial responses across almost the full hierarchy of the New Zealand justice system. Although unlikely to capture every sovereign interaction with state institutions, the dataset provides meaningful insight into recurring practices, grievances, and patterns.
Donna Cleaver is an experienced security practitioner and has recently submitted her doctoral thesis on anti-government extremism in New Zealand undertaken with the Centre of Defence and Security Studies. Correspondence about this article can be facilitated though NSJ co-editors – j.m.battersby@massey.ac.nz or d.r.rogers@massey.ac.nz