When Rights Cannot Be Used: Defensive Sovereignty, Privacy, and the Operational Conditions of Citizenship

This paper extends the framework of conditionalized sovereignty [1] from permission-based autonomy to defensive sovereignty. While conditionalized sovereignty explains how formally recognized autonomy may become dependent on permission, defensive sovereignty examines whether citizens retain the operational capacities required to defend rights against arbitrary power. The central argument is that rights are not secure merely because they are formally declared; they require usable infrastructures, procedures, remedies, privacy protections, financial access, communicative channels, educational plurality, legal recognition of caregiving and family-like arrangements, and contestable decision-making systems. The paper introduces the concepts of operational citizenship, rights-disabling, hybrid power, function creep, assessment capture, relational rights-disabling, and resilient sovereignty safeguards. Drawing on legal, political-theoretical, human-rights, artificial intelligence (AI) governance, property-rights, emergency-powers, and policy-capture literature, it analyzes selected domains of modern civic life in which rights may remain formally intact while becoming operationally fragile. It concludes with the Resilient Sovereignty Safeguards Test, a diagnostic framework for assessing whether rights remain usable when the infrastructures required to exercise and defend them are controlled, weakened, or made dependent on discretionary permission.