 There have been some weird ways of running places over the years. Not just in the real world, but in the land of fiction as well, since dystopia has made up about 80% of all YA novels for a while there. It's extremely common for conflict to revolve around overthrowing governments, destroying governments, or manipulating governments in some way. Governments are a huge part of most every setting, from fantasy to sci-fi to post-apocalypse to dystopia to alternate history. So why are most of them so boring? And I don't mean that in the sense that congressional debates and drafting bills is boring. That's a given. I mean that we're given no information about them whatsoever. There's a king who runs everything, or there's a president who agrees with the good guys, but the legislature is corrupt and doesn't agree with the good guys, or the president is a dictator and the legislature is only for show. It depends on what sort of tone we're going for. In most cases though, it's paper thin. Probably the most common type of government used in any sort of fantastical setting is an absolute hereditary monarchy, and to a certain extent I can't blame writers for taking the easy route. One guy is in charge, he can do whatever he wants, and when he dies his son is in charge. Sometimes someone else thinks they should be in charge and then there's a war. It's not like this was uncommon in real history, up until a few hundred years ago it was the norm for most of the world's population, but it was far from the only way that countries were run. There were constitutional monarchies, aristocratic republics, direct democracies, even people that lived in stateless societies without formal governments at all. I see way too little creativity in fantasy and science fiction governments, so I'm making this video to give examples of styles of governing structures and what sort of countries would have what style. Part one, monarchies and dictatorships. I want to start with monarchies just because that's the most common form of government used. Even in places where monarchy was accepted, there was sometimes a fear of allowing one man to become a tyrant, so things like feudalism cropped up to make sure that other nobles had their rights and privileges protected. The peasants got nothing, just look at the Magna Carta for an example. Part of the reason feudalism existed was because kings weren't able to project their power very far and so they were reliant on their vassals. Really that was the whole reason it existed. Absolute monarchies are hard to maintain. Obviously this is an oversimplification, there's no generic template for this, but that is the general idea. It's not uncommon for monarchies to exist in science fiction settings either, for some reason. Try to imagine setting up a monarchy in a country like the United States or Germany or India today. The concept alone is bizarre and we've all just decided to accept it. If you want to show a democracy or a republic transition to rule by one man or one party, it makes more sense for it to become something like a military junta or a fake democracy where the people in charge are in charge because they either muscled their way in or they just rigged things in their favor. Even in places where they don't pretend to be democratic like Nazi Germany and the People's Republic of China, they don't declare their leaders kings whose descendants will rule after they die. The idea sounds ridiculous to modern minds. Another bit about monarchies that I almost never see get brought up is the religious aspect. Rulers came up with all sorts of justifications for why they were in charge. In medieval Europe, they had a concept called the divine right of kings, which basically said that the king was in charge because God put him there, so if you disobey him, you're disobeying God. In China, they had the mandate of heaven, which was very similar. And if there were disasters like famine, then that means the emperor had lost the mandate of heaven. In Islam, they have something called the caliph, which is someone who's both the religious leader and the political ruler. It's kind of like if someone combines the role of king and pope. Kind of. Some cultures went even farther, calling their monarch an actual God or demigod. To offend or disobey your king was to discard your religion and invite the wrath of forces far more powerful than you. Religion played a big part in real monarchies, but I almost never see it get brought up. There are plenty of ways to incorporate this into a setting. If you want to keep it simple, then just use something like the divine right of kings and leave it at that. If you want to make it a big deal, consider using something like a caliph or making the monarch a living God. Besides all that, the thing about a system where the leader of a country is chosen by genetic lottery is it's not very effective. I know there are unironic monarchists out there, for some reason, but when your ruler is chosen based on their great-great-grandfather being in charge, you're rolling the dice. Sometimes you'll get an amazing leader, like Alexander the Great. Other times you'll get someone incompetent and completely disconnected from the lives of ordinary people, like Tsar Nicholas II. People who grew up surrounded by wealth and privilege don't understand the plight of the common folks. That's not to say they can't still be a good ruler who sails the ship of state straight and true, but when they're in control of absolutely everything, they can royally fuck things up. Heh. Royally. I made it funny. Not to mention that nobles wanted to keep wealth within their families, which led to prolific inbreeding. Look at some paintings of the Habsburgs. Christ. If you've got a king who's an idiot, how do you prevent him from crashing your economy and starting unwinnable wars? You set up another body to oppose him. If you have a parliament or a diet made up of other nobility that can act together to check the king's power, then you've got yourself a little constitutional monarchy. And the only time I can remember seeing this was in the original Mistborn trilogy. Historically, legislatures came up for a couple of different reasons. A big one was the appearance of a wealthy class of merchants who wanted to spread their influence. Whether through peaceful means or through uprisings and revolutions, they muscled their way into power. At first, participating in the legislature was usually restricted to men who had a certain level of wealth. The lower classes were still shut out. Obviously, this varies a lot as well. But the general idea is that the transition away from monarchy happened because classes outside of the aristocracy gained enough power to make themselves heard and exert influence over the political process. Which could be a neat plot to follow, and I haven't really seen it done before. This leads into part two. Part two, democracies and sort of democracies. A democracy is a system where all citizens participate and vote on every issue. This is usually called direct democracy today, and what we think of as democracy, the people electing various representatives, is called the Democratic Republic. This is the most common type of government in the modern world, as well as one of the most complex. There are approximately ten shit-gazillion rules and regulations concerning how representatives are elected, what powers they have, how they can pass new laws, etc. The general idea is to restrict everyone's power so much that nobody can abuse it too badly. And can I just say that a fantasy world doesn't always have to be a monarchy? Republics and democracies have existed for thousands of years now. Throw some in there. I don't think I need to go into too much detail about how Democratic Republics work. Most of us are familiar with it. We all know more or less how voting works and how the process becomes corrupted by things like money and bureaucracy. It's an equalizing force, but it leaves many hierarchies and power disparities intact. Mostly, I want to talk about semi-democracies and fake democracies. Now, there are a million ways to shut out the will of the voters, restricting the right to vote to certain groups is a simple way. But there's also stuff like adding a house to the legislature that represents a specific subsection of the population, giving them a disproportionate amount of power. Tons of this stuff is all over, and I'd encourage you to do some of your own research. If you want to give the citizens of your setting something to fight over, this sort of stuff is a place to start. And when this sort of thing is taken to an extreme, the democracy becomes completely fake. A dictator might come to power through legitimate means, but once he starts changing the voting districts to favor his party, banning his biggest opponents from running in elections, and staffing election commissions with cronies who will stuff the ballot boxes, he becomes a dictator. The elections are only for show at that point, to maintain a veneer of legitimacy. There's a quote that's often attributed to Joseph Stalin. It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes. I'd recommend not going into extreme detail about constitutional conventions and parliamentary procedure, because even I think that's boring. But just by keeping some of this in mind, you can make things a tad more three-dimensional than, this is the Republic of Good Guys and that's the Empire of Bad Guys. Part 3, The Little Things. This should be short. In fact, I can sum it up in a single sentence. The wheels of government run based on bureaucrats and secretaries and tax collectors, the little people. They make things run. A king or president is the position everyone wants to focus on, but they need people to enforce their laws on the land, not just a military. I'm not saying that you should spend weeks of your time detailing every position in government all the way from Prime Minister of the Galactic Federation down to county clerks. I'm saying that you should acknowledge these sorts of positions and use them to give information about your setting. If you want to show that the current government is corrupt, show local judges taking bribes. If you want to show how the state is poor, show the tax collectors being unable to meet their quotas. If you want to show how some of the people are unsupportive of the current regime, show the local clerks and officers blatantly ignoring unpopular laws. Things like this can help make other aspects of a setting really pop, even if they aren't all that interesting on their own. That's all. Part 4, Statelessness. Here's something that a lot of modern people have trouble wrapping their heads around. Humans haven't always lived in countries and they especially haven't always lived in modern nation states. Now, let me explain. The idea of a modern nation state is both very complex and very slippery. Just try and come up with a precise definition for what a country is. It's surprisingly hard. Before the modern era, there were tons of people who lived in a system of governments that can't be called a country at all. A lot of us lived in societies ruled by chieftains, or societies that weren't ruled in the first place. A chieftain in this context is different from a king because people only follow him because they want to, not necessarily because they have to. Maybe because he was charismatic, or maybe because he killed everyone who wouldn't do what he said. The point is that the ruling structure isn't as formalized as it is in a more complex political system. This isn't considered a form of statehood. It's what's known as a chieftain. This is another term that's very slippery and has variations, so some anthropologists in the audience might get angry with me. A perfect example of this are the Dothraki from A Song of Ice and Fire. There are nomadic people who are divided up into large bands called Calisars. Calisars aren't divided up based on culture, or language, or religion. They all just follow different chiefs, known as Cales. The people only follow him because they feel like it, and or because they think he's able to protect them from other Cales. If they want to leave, they're free to do so. When a Cal dies, his Calisar ceases to exist. At the end of A Game of Thrones, Cal Drogo dies, and a dozen other men all take some of his former followers and split into a bunch of other Calisars. The Dothraki are a textbook example of chieftain. In real life, most nomadic peoples like the Comanche or the Mongols lived a similar lifestyle where they wandered around hurting their animals and raiding their neighbors. These societies were also more egalitarian than settled ones, where most wealth tended to be hoarded by a small elite. Nomadic people are sometimes known for creating giant empires, but that's because they would conquer countries of settled peoples near their territory. They would rule over the states they conquered and often wound up settling down themselves, so really they were absorbed into the states rather than the other way around. Not all stateless societies were chieftains though. Some were more like direct democracies only without a government apparatus to do things like collect taxes or form armies. People just worked together to make sure that they were all cared for and protected. Settled peoples can be stateless too, it's just rarer since the unbalanced resource distribution that comes with agriculture makes that hard to maintain. All of this isn't to say that societies must follow a linear progression from stateless hunter-gatherers to empires or from kingdoms to nation-states, nor that nation-states are the ultimate final form of civilization. Some people even advocate for the abolition of the state altogether. So that was a long diatribe explaining what a stateless society is. How does it relate to world-building? There are two big ways I can think of. The first are the barbarians that seem to pop up in every fantasy. In most settings, their portrayed as disorganized raiders will only become a real threat when they're united into some sort of confederation. This is close to how it usually went down in real life, so why not mix it up a little? Have them be a democratic society, or show their transition from being stateless into becoming an empire. They wouldn't even have to conquer anyone necessarily, they could just be united by a chieftain who then creates a monarchy. It's not a significant change, but it would look at things from a different angle. The second is how anarchists tend to be ignored in alternate history or science fiction settings. Despite being filled with revolutions and civil wars spurred on by all kinds of fringe ideologies, these settings rarely have anarchists brought up. They played major roles in the Spanish and Russian civil wars, they affected politics in multiple countries throughout the 20th century, and they've been integral parts of anti-fascist movements ever since fascism became a thing. They've even played a big role in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Every setting wants to have rebels of some sort, so why not give them some unique reasoning for their actions? It would help it stand out, at least. Part five, revolutions and uprisings. This is the part that'll be most relevant to most of you, I can tell. Why do governments fall? Lots of reasons. They can get invaded and taken over from outside, or they can get overthrown from the inside, or they can just collapse in on themselves. The most common type of uprising depicted in fiction is one of the noble common folk rising up against the oppressive authoritarians in order to bring back freedom and democracy. That's usually not how real revolutions work, though. The rebels will often be fighting for more specific political reasons, like religious fundamentalism, regional separatisms, or sometimes military juntas. It isn't uncommon for there to be multiple rebel factions that are only united in their hatred of the current regime, and then they immediately turn on each other once it's gone. The Russian Civil War is a great example of this. Tsar Nicholas was overthrown without much bloodshed in March 1917, and a democratic government was set up. But the differences between political factions was too great, and by November, all sides started killing each other. The following war had Tsarists, Bolsheviks, anarchists, nationalists in various areas, people fighting for a military dictatorship, moderate socialists, people fighting to establish democracy. It was a mess. All sides had some overlap between them, and they all had shifting alliances based on convenience. Even after the war, when the Bolsheviks were victorious, they purged their own ranks of those who didn't toe the line. This doesn't just apply to rebels either. Any type of government is going to be subject to factionalism and infighting, whether violent or otherwise. This Hunger Games idea of a revolution where the rebels all get along is ridiculous. Frankly, I just want to see more settings and stories acknowledge this. That aside, the average person isn't going to take up arms if they don't feel they have to. Despite what keyboard warriors and neckbeards think, upending your whole life and plunging your home into the fires of war is no easy thing. You need a real reason for it. Economic or domestic issues have to be getting pretty bad for people to be willing to risk life and limb in order to bring about change. People will generally put up with a lot if they're properly fed. Much of the reason that the people of France overthrew their monarchy in 1789 was because there was a famine going on, and they saw the upper classes living a luxurious life. They felt the only way to survive was to revolt. I've seen this done before... sort of. In the Hunger Games, the people of Pan Am were already on the verge of starving, and they only needed a small spark to get their asses in gear. But that means they could have revolted earlier and just... chose not to. I get that the odds would have been stacked against any districts that rose up, but there probably should have been regular food riots. And when was the last time the loyalists got any focus? A government can't survive without the support of any of the population. Someone is willing to fight for them. There are tons of reasons they might do this. Maybe their class or ethnic group benefits from the current regime. Maybe they think the rebels have good points, but are too extreme. Maybe they don't understand what's going on at all. Long story short, just remember that everyone has different opinions, and no matter how stupid a position may be, someone out there holds it. Conclusion. I want to reiterate this. Don't spend weeks or months constructing a detailed political system complete with a full constitution and legislative process. You'll never be able to put it into your work without boring almost everyone. This is an area that can enrich a setting, yes, but it's best to use it like salt. Sprinkle a little in for flavor. All plots revolve around conflict. And epic sci-fi or fantasy stories often revolve around big epic conflict between countries and other huge organizations. All conflicts start small though, and the people who initiate or direct them must navigate their own conflicts, violent or otherwise, to stay in charge. If government bureaucracy and internal politics seems like something you don't have to consider in world-building, just remember that the people who run the real world run it by using those very things. Anywho, thanks to Christopher Hawkin, Des Brennan, Joseph Pendergraft, and all of my other patrons, whose names are on the screen now, consider checking out my page and donating. And if you can't do that, just give this video a like to make it more visible. Bye.