I read a book called War in the Tribal Zone. It defined Tribes as a structured, hierarchical society that forms when an Imperial society intrudes in to the territory of low-complexity, non-hierarchical societies. Not "primitive" societies, but societies that never developed hierarchies because they never needed them. And the theory the book was putting forward is that when a low-complexity society tries to defend itself from an Imperialist state they tend to form Tribal societies as a kind of immune reaction - Either they develop more structured political and military organization to better fight against the invader's highly organized troops and logistics, or the invaders find compradors and give those collaborators the guns and material they need to take control of the society.

Regardless of exactly why and how it happens, the result is a more hierarchical society with more coercive political and military organs. There are other ways to try to exist, but mostly they don't work and the societies that try them are either wiped out or forced to submit something else.

The part I thought was interesting is that it positioned the nation-state of the Imperialist states as a technology in and of itself. A technology that allowed for large, highly effective militaries and the efficient production and movement of goods and materiel. A nation state might send in a hundred soldiers and a low-complexity society could wipe them out, but if that happened then the next year the nation state would send a thousand soldiers, and using their territories they'd violently recruit more and more soldiers and send them out to die until the society they were trying to control was either destroyed or enslaved.

And the premise was that basically once one society invents the nation-state, or it's various highly organized hierarchical predecessors, it forced everyone it came in contact with to adopt the technology. All the attempts to build a competing organizational technology were ultimately defeated, resulting in a world where almost all military and economic power is held by nation states. It's, idk, like introducing a chunk of crystal in to a supersaturated solution. The crystal catalyst forces everything else to crystalize in response, turning the entire solution from an un-structured material to a structured crystal.

And then my take-away is that if we every want to have something other than nation-states we have to build a nation-state killing organizational technology. That might mean chewing up nation-states from the inside using parallel power, it might mean building a new kind of non-state organization that can fight nation states on equal footing, and it might mean something else entirely. Regardless, I don't think we're there yet, but with all the possibilities of rapidly emerging technologies and the chaos of the 21st century I think the ground is better laid than it has been in most of the last few centuries.