Neomedievalism
The argument that the world is drifting away from an order in which states hold a monopoly on legitimate force, toward one where that force is shared among corporations, armed groups, criminal networks, religious movements, and other non-state actors. The resemblance it draws is to the late medieval pattern of many overlapping, competing authorities laying claim to the same ground — the analogy is structural, not a literal return to feudalism. It frames the era of the sovereign state as a passing interruption rather than the natural shape of international order.
The thesis that the post-Westphalian international order is dissolving into a configuration in which states share the legitimate use of force with corporations, NGOs, criminal networks, religious movements, and other non-state actors — a structure resembling the late medieval European order more closely than the twentieth-century Westphalian one.
Etymology§
Coined in international-relations theory in the 1970s by Hedley Bull (The Anarchical Society, 1977), revived and given a sharper edge in Sean McFate's The Modern Mercenary (2014). The "neo-" carries the usual modesty: the analogy is structural, not literal — there are no feudal vows, but there is overlapping and contested authority over the same territory and the same actors.
The neomedieval thesis reads the rise of the modern PMC, the chartered extraterritoriality of the multinational corporation, and the persistent failure of the state monopoly on violence in zones of weak governance as evidence that the Westphalian period — roughly 1648 to the late twentieth century — was an exception rather than the natural form of international order. On this reading, the medieval condition of plural, overlapping, contested authorities is closer to the human default; the Westphalian state was a four-century interruption.
The thesis carries explanatory weight for chartered-violence frameworks specifically: each chartered private force fits inside it as one more authority in the plural mix, with its sovereign acting as one of several patrons, its operators acting as one of several armed parties on the ground, and the relationship between them as contractual rather than constitutional.
It is not a uniformly persuasive thesis — the persistence of state sovereignty over kinetic action in major-power conflicts pushes back against it — but it is the canonical academic frame inside which the modern revival of chartered force is usually read.