It turned out that the city had been not so much ungovernable as ungoverned.
The main issue is whether the Internet, so far relatively ungoverned, should be regulated like radio and television.
But to regard the British Midlands and the banlieues of Paris as ungoverned spaces would be stretching a point.
"Partly, this is a consequence of the Arab Spring and the power vacuums and ungoverned spaces that have sprung up in its wake, " it said.
North and South Waziristan are among seven districts in Pakistan's ungoverned tribal region, where the Taliban and other militants have sought haven.
CNN: Two U.S. missile strikes kill 17 in Pakistan, sources say
We must close down the ungoverned space in which they thrive and we must deal with the grievances they use to garner support.
It deployed Hizbullah and Revolutionary Guards operatives and other intelligence and terror assets along the largely ungoverned tri-border area between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.
But this overlaps only in part with, say, the ungoverned spaces that America's State Department regards as the nastiest havens for international terrorists, such as al-Qaeda.
Washington also wants an aggressive push by Pakistani authorities to take action against al Qaeda-linked groups in the largely ungoverned tribal areas along its border with Afghanistan.
Several insurgencies in north-west Africa could fuse to create a vast ungoverned space including Niger, Chad and southern Libya to function as a haven for militants preparing attacks.
There are vast areas of largely ungoverned space that have attracted al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and other extremist allies in Yemen and throughout the region.
This would enable a controlled solution to an ungoverned problem.
Farmers, and particularly ranchers, are the main obstacle preventing the Beduin from taking over the Negev and connecting a lawless, ungoverned southern Israel to Gaza, Sinai and Judea.
The Pakistan military's top spokesman called the attacks, which he said were by pilotless drones, "counterproductive, " because they undercut his country's efforts to oust militants from the ungoverned tribal areas.
CNN: Two U.S. missile strikes kill 17 in Pakistan, sources say
The fear that really prompted French intervention and that guaranteed it wide-spread support was the nightmare that a vast area like northern Mali could turn into ungoverned space providing a sanctuary for AQIM.
Israel has long been concerned that the Sinai Peninsula is fast becoming ungoverned space: a Bedouin-dominated mini-state beyond Cairo's control, with various radical Palestinian groups often linked to local Bedouin extremists operating at will.
"In particular, the task is to understand the nature of the new threat - more decentralised, more fragmented, taking advantage of the ungoverned spaces and security vacuum in parts of North Africa, " he said.
That leaves conflicts that rage in weak and failing states (as in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan), or in ungoverned space (in parts of Somalia), where rival non-state actors, terrorist groups, militants and warlords do battle.
On the contrary, he said terrorist groups would be encouraged if the international community ignored "ungoverned spaces and chaotic countries" and allowed them to fester - adding that this "was the lesson from Afghanistan and Somalia".
After the September attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to suggest that there may have been a link between AQIM operating freely in Mali's ungoverned spaces and the tragedy in eastern Libya.
Ungoverned Somalia has few such projects.
ECONOMIST: Did the world react too late to signs of famine in Somalia?
All this talk of a Bitcoin bubble has annoyed the true believers - an interesting mixture of libertarians and cryptographic specialists charmed by the idea of a currency that embodies many of the open and virtually ungoverned principles of the internet itself.
"This area became a huge ungoverned area and inside an ungoverned area many, many players want to be inside and want to play their own role and to work for their own interests, " said Gal Hirsch, a reserve Israeli brigadier general who is involved in the military's strategic planning and operations.
Look, I think you've heard the President discuss in a number of his statements actions that our administration has been involved in in fighting al Qaeda and its extremist allies not just in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but as the President has talked about, in Yemen and in places like Somalia, the ungoverned spaces where al Qaeda tends to take root.
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