This article draws on the insight that people and communities have fundamental relationships with place. People are defined and shaped by place; and place is, in turn, defined and shaped by communi...

Recent theories of territorial rights could be characterized by their growing attention to environmental concerns and resource rights (understood as the rights of jurisdiction and/or ownership over natural resources). Here I examine two: Avery Kolers’s theory of ethnogeographical plenitude, and Cara Nine’s theory of legitimate political authority over people and resources. While Kolers is a pioneer in demanding ecological sustainability as a minimum requirement for any viable theory of territorial rights – building a bridge between environmental and political philosophy – (...) Nine highlights a crucial distinction when looking at territorial rights from a global justice perspective, namely that between jurisdictional powers and ownership rights over resources. Daring and innovative at first glance, I claim that both theories present, however, deep ambiguities and retreat from their radical implications which, if taken seriously, would lead to a massive redrawing of current territorial borders. (shrink)

It is by now widely agreed that a theory of territorial rights must be able to explain attachment or particularity: what can link a particular group to a particular place with the kind of normative force necessary to forbid encroachment or colonization?1 Attachment is one of the pillars on which any successful theory of territory will have to stand. But the notion of attachment is not yet well understood, and such agreement as does exist relies on unexamined assumptions. One such (...) assumption is that attachment is an achievement of some sort, as opposed to some kind of brute ascriptive status that a claimant has irrespective of anything it might do.But achievements do not come for free. 'Achievement' is a success .. (shrink)

This paper sets out a research agenda for a political theory of climate displacement, by critically examining one prominent proposal—the idea of a normative status for ‘climate refugees’—and by proposing an alternative. Drawing on empirical work on climate displacement, I show that the concept of the climate refugee obscures the complexity and heterogeneity of climate displacement. I argue that, because of this complexity and heterogeneity, approaches to climate displacement that put the concept of the climate refugee at their centre will (...) fail to treat like cases alike and relevantly different cases differently. In response to these failings, I outline an alternative—the pluralist theory of climate displacement—which confronts the specific challenges that climate displacement poses in different practical and institutional contexts, whilst also treating climate displacement as a unified phenomenon at the second-order level of burden-sharing. (shrink)

Inhabitants of low-lying islands flooded due to anthropogenic climate change will lose their territory and thereby their ability to exercise their right to political self-determination. This paper addresses the normative questions which arise when climate change threatens territorial rights. It explores whether the loss of statehood supports a claim to territorial compensation, and if so, how it can be satisfied. The paper concludes that such claims are well founded and that they should be met by providing compensatory territories. After introducing (...) a differentiation between land rights and territorial rights, previous theoretical responses to the problem of sinking islands are criticized. It is argued that states may be required to give up parts of their territory as compensation. The paper develops criteria of sufficiency for compensatory territories and proposes to base their selection process on a negative auction. Since it is unlikely that unsettled compensatory territories that meet the specified requirements are available, the rights of their original inhabitants are discussed. (shrink)

This paper sketches an account of reparative justice for climate refugees, focusing on total land loss due to sea-level rise. I begin by outlining the harm of this loss in terms of self-determination and cultural heritage. I then consider, first, who is owed these reparations? Second, who should pay such reparations? Third, in what form should the reparations be paid? I end with thoughts on the project of reparative justice more generally, arguing that such obligations do not depend upon a (...) perfect account of how reparations might be fulfilled; we simply have an obligation to shoot the arrow as close to the target as we can. (shrink)

In my 2012 book On Global Justice, I argued that humanity’s collective ownership of the earth should be central to reflection on the permissibility of immigration. Other philosophers have recently offered accounts of immigration that do without the kind of global standpoint provided by collective ownership. I argue here that all these attempts fail. But once we see how humanity’s collective ownership of the earth can deliver a genuinely global standpoint on immigration, we must also consider two alternative ways of (...) offering such a standpoint. First, some have argued that any given generation should be regarded as inheriting both the natural and the societal wealth of humanity. The second alternative invokes ethno-geographic communities characterized by particular land-use patterns. This approach would deliver a global standpoint on immigration by determining which community gets to select the land-use pattern for a given location. I argue that thinking about immigration from the standpoint of collective ownership of the earth is superior to both of those alternatives. While advancing a standpoint from which to think about questions of immigration/migration, this article also offers explanations to situate its themes in the current philosophical debate and cover quite a range of topics in the debate about immigration. No prior acquaintance with On Global Justice is presupposed here. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the extent to which the concept of emergence can be applied to questions about the nature and moral justification of territorial borders. Although the term is used with many different senses in philosophy, the concept of “weak emergence”—advocated by, for example, Sawyer (2002, 2005) and Bedau (1997)—is especially applicable, since it forces a distinction between prediction and explanation that connects with several issues in the dis-cussion of territory. In particular, we argue, weak emergentism about borders (...) allows us to distinguish between (a) using a theory of territory to say where a border should be drawn, and (b) looking at an existing border and saying whether or not it is justified (Miller, 2012; Nine, 2012; Stilz, 2011). Many authors conflate these two factors, or identify them by claiming that having one without the other is in some sense incoherent. But on our account—given the concept of emergence—one might unproblematically be able to have (b) without (a); at the very least, the distinction between these two issues is much more significant than has often been recognised, and more importantly gives us some reason to prefer “statist” as opposed to “cultural” theories of territorial borders. We conclude with some further reflections on related matters concerning, firstly, the apparent causal powers of borders, and secondly, the different ways in which borders are physically implemented (e.g., land vs. water). (shrink)