Pop Sov Warfare
- By
- M.J. Zilla
- Format
- Paperback / Digital
- Publication
- Forthcoming
- Published by
- PopSov
A book about power, warfare, and popular sovereignty
Power rarely
announces itself as warfare.
Most of us encounter power at the end of the system: a bill we cannot afford, a job that disappears, poisoned water, a rule we did not choose, a technology we cannot escape, an institution that will not listen.
Pop Sov Warfare rewinds the system. It asks who had the power to produce those conditions, how private wealth and influence become public authority, how that authority shapes our lives, and what it would take for ordinary people to exercise the power they are supposed to hold.
A project of PopSov.org
The Polycrisis
What if the crisis
is a polycrisis?
Seven interconnected domains. One system of oppression.
ClimateHousingPoliticalEpistemicSocialTechnologicalCivicHealthcare
The Septology
How power moves
across systems.
The Septology of Oppression identifies seven interconnected domains through which power can constrain, extract from, degrade, capture, or disable the conditions of collective life. The Ecological domain is numbered 00 because it is the material life-support substrate. This book enters through the Political domain.
- 00EcologicalMaterial substrate
- 01Economic
- 02PoliticalThis book
- 03Epistemic
- 04Social
- 05Technological
- 06Civic
00EcologicalThe material conditions life depends on: land, water, climate, food systems, energy, habitat, and environmental safety.Material substrate•
01EconomicLabor, ownership, debt, housing, capital, extraction, dependency, and productive capacity.•
02PoliticalPublic authority, law, governance, representation, and the institutions that make collective decisions binding.•
03EpistemicKnowledge, truth, education, expertise, media, memory, and the conditions through which people can understand and contest power.•
04SocialSolidarity, belonging, fragmentation, isolation, hierarchy, and social standing.•
05TechnologicalPlatforms, surveillance, computation, infrastructure, data, automation, and artificial intelligence.•
06CivicParticipation, organization, association, dissent, contestability, and collective action.•
Seven domains of oppression.
This book enters through the political domain.
02Political
Pop Sov Warfare names the singular warfare enacted against the populace as the rightful popular sovereign when oppression degrades, captures, constrains, extracts from, or disables the capacities required to exercise sovereignty materially.
The book enters through public power: how it can become captured, insulated, distorted, or made answerable to interests other than the people it governs.
The people are supposed to be sovereign. So why aren't they?
The control cycle
Power
compounds.
Domination is rarely one decision, one institution, or one bad actor. When capacity is lost, captured, or constrained in one domain, that change can create leverage in another. That leverage can produce greater dependency, fewer alternatives, weaker contestability, and still more concentrated power.
The Control Cycle traces those relationships without assuming they exist in every case. The point is not to force everything into a theory. The point is to see the mechanism clearly enough to know where intervention is possible.
00Ecological
The wheel preserves the Septology's spatial relationships. It does not prescribe a universal chronology.
Pop Sov Warfare
Power leaves evidence.
Follow the evidence across systems and some conditions that appear separate can reveal supported relationships among institutions, incentives, public authority, dependency, and lived burden.
The book distinguishes documented fact, causal inference, competing explanation, and unresolved uncertainty rather than forcing every case into the framework.
Follow the moneyWho decides?Who benefits?The Scorecard
Follow the record.
A living tally of litigation outcomes.
This scorecard summarizes major legal challenges to executive action. Green marks cases the people won, red where they lost, and yellow where litigation continues. Counts are summaries, not verdicts — each case remains drillable to its procedural status and source.
290People won
161People lost
412In litigation
38Mixed result
952Cases tracked
64%Binary win share
All topics included · 952 cases in comparison. Binary win share = won ÷ (won + lost).
Recently updated
2026-09-04State of California v. United States Postal Service
2026-09-02State of Illinois v. Department of Health and Human Services
2026-09-02California v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Project 2027
From diagnosis
to capacity.
Understanding the system is not the same as changing it. Project 2027 is a living plan for building popular capacity ahead of 2028 and beyond.
Pop Sov Warfare asks how we got here. Project 2027 asks where we go from here.
- 01ResistRefuse the inevitability or continued operation of domination.
- 02ResearchInvestigate the systems, histories, mechanisms, and effects producing the condition.
- 03RefineTest, synthesize, document, and turn the research into a coherent account.
- 04RedirectTurn refined understanding toward a deliberate change in systemic trajectory.
Read the
argument.
An examination of power, oppression, and popular sovereignty.
Pop Sov Warfare examines how the people can remain sovereign in principle while the public power exercised in their name becomes captured, insulated, distorted, or materially answerable elsewhere. It traces how those shifts move through the conditions of everyday life — and what capacities would be required to make popular sovereignty materially exercisable.
The people are supposed to be sovereign. So why aren't they?
Popular sovereignty must be materially exercisable, not merely promised.
Power should not become
so concentrated that people cannot contest it.
Institutions should not become
so insulated that people cannot govern them.
Technology should not become
so essential that people cannot leave it.
Markets should not become
so dominant that survival requires submission.
Popular sovereignty begins with capacity
See the system.
Contest the system.
Build the system anew.
The book provides the education. Project 2027 provides the plan. NME provides a place to participate.
Read · Investigate · Organize · Build