What we are living through is not simply the decline of one empire or the transition from one dominant power to another, not a shift from American to Chinese hegemony, or from unipolarity to multipolarity within the existing paradigm. We are living through the exhaustion of the Westphalian model itself: the breakdown of the assumption that sovereignty means territorial control, that governance requires a state, and that the fundamental unit of political organization is a bordered jurisdiction administered by a central authority