Any domain is entirely at the mercy of the registrar, and for country domains that's entirely in the country itself. It's amusing to me that some of the most "desirable" country domains are also coincidentally some of the most unstable countries.

This is not entirely true. For example the .se domain is not controlled by the Swedish government but is administered by The Swedish Internet Foundation which is a private foundation (source I work there..). It is (now) regulated somewhat by law.

Perhaps, but a private foundation in Sweden is subject to the laws thereof - if Sweden wanted to regain complete control there's not much your foundation could do.

Libya has been known to shut down websites they don't like: https://www.neowin.net/news/nicly-down-as-libyas-response-to...

If I understand correctly, the .so TLD is effectively a national resource of Somalia, and as such they have total control over it and could in fact shut it down if they wanted.