Anna Stilz: Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration
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Anna Stilz: Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019, 292 pp, ISBN: 9780198833536 Daniel Sharp1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Our world is divided into discrete states, each of which claims jurisdiction over a distinct territory. This mode of organization is contingent: it has been and could be otherwise. It also generates moral hazards: war, inequality, and collective action problems. These hazards, cosmopolitans conjecture, underscore the illegitimacy of territorial sovereignty and necessity of an alternative mode of global organization. In Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration, Anna Stilz contends that a system of territorial sovereignty, a world of independent territorial states, can be morally justified. Such a system realizes three significant moral values—occupancy, basic justice, and collective self-determination—each of which protects an aspect of autonomy: the capacity to reflect upon, endorse, revise, and pursue one’s projects. Our duty to respect autonomy thus gives us reason to prefer, with Kant, a federative league of states to a world state. Yet, Stilz is no apologist for the status quo. Rather, she argues that the same values which ground states’ territorial rights entail that those rights are more limited than is commonly thought. The resultant ‘revisionist view of the nature and moral basis of territorial sovereignty’ (p. 10) constitutes a promising alternative to cosmopolitanism and an invaluable contribution to global political theory. Part I begins by considering what ‘gives a particular set of people a special claim to live in a given area’ (p. 33). Stilz’s answer is that people’s projects, goals, and attachments are often intimately tied to particular localities. Our interest in pursuing located life plans—which usually depend on situated social practices—form the basis of Stilz’s case for occupancy rights. An occupancy right consists in a liberty to permanently reside in and use a particular space to pursue one’s projects and a claim-right against being removed from or hindered from returning to that space or pursuing one’s projects there. Like natural property rights, occupancy rights can pre-exist social conventions. However, occupancy rights are rights to use places and do not imply full ownership. * Daniel Sharp [email protected] 1
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Stilz’s thought is that one’s located life plans ground occupancy rights when the formation and pursuit of those plans is compatible with the equal claims of others to form and pursue their own located life plans. Specifically, a person acquires an occupy right to a particular place if that place is fundamental to her comprehensive located life plans and her connection to it was established without wrongdoing on her part—without violating either occupancy rights of prior occupants or the fairuse proviso (discussed later). Stilz believes individuals, rather than collectives, hold occupancy rights. Th
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