Occupancy Rights

This chapter outlines the book’s account of foundational title to land, explaining the basis on which certain people have a special claim to live in a specific area, including the right to set up a state that governs that space. It argues that foundational title is a bundle of individual occupancy rights held by the state’s inhabitants. Occupancy rights protect our plan-based interests in the locational continuity of our central life commitments, as well as our more generalized control interest in being the agent in charge of revising and reshaping these commitments. Occupancy confers at least some of the incidents associated with property, including rights to secure access to, use, and control of a particular area. This raises important questions about the kind of right occupancy is meant to be, which are examined in Chapter 3.

Conclusion: Territorial Sovereignty and Global Institutions

This book has offered a qualified defense of a territorial states system. This chapter summarizes the book’s argument and suggests we have a common responsibility to work to create multilateral institutions that would better specify, allocate, and enforce duties to protect the fundamental territorial interests of the earth’s inhabitants. Following Kant, the chapter argues for institutionalizing these cosmopolitan duties through multilateral cooperation and horizontal sanctioning, rather than by instituting a world government with executive powers. There is every reason to work toward climate justice, more extensive refugee rights, and other cosmopolitan reforms via “self-binding” arrangements that will reflect, rather than violate, collective self-determination. Such a strategy may allow for the establishment of multilateral institutions that can limit state sovereignty by enforceable duties to secure fundamental territorial interests.

Is There a Right to Exclude?

This chapter continues to investigate whether the three core values defended in this book (occupancy, basic justice, and collective self-determination) can justify states’ exclusionary claims to border control. This chapter focuses on what we might call opportunity migrants, those who are not suffering from persecution, persistent violations of their basic human rights (including subsistence rights), environmental devastation, or cultural or political oppression. Can states exclude migrants whose fundamental territorial interests are not at stake? What about travelers, students, economic migrants, and so on? The chapter argues that a state may exclude immigrants of this sort only where it can offer a plausible case that their entry would cause harm.

Territorial Distribution

States claim exclusionary sovereignty rights that extend beyond territorial jurisdiction. Often these claims involve denying outsiders access to both their territories and the natural resources situated there. Can these exclusionary rights be justified on the basis of the three core values? This chapter argues that if it is to be legitimate, the states system must impose a fair-use proviso on the distribution of territory. This means a state may not exclude outsiders in cases (i) where their basic territorial interests are persistently unfulfilled where they now are or (ii) where they lack a territorial base in which to pursue the social, cultural, economic, and political practices that matter to them. Fulfilling this duty requires changes to our refugee and asylum practices.

Refining the Political Autonomy Account

This chapter extends the political autonomy theory of self-determination by responding to a variety of challenges. Is collective self-determination possible in a modern mass society, where citizens have (and can only have) a negligible influence over political decisions? How do we define the “self” in self-determination? Does self-determination require democratic governance or is it compatible with nondemocratic arrangements? Does self-determination apply only to overseas dependencies or also to internal minorities? How does it cohere with other international principles, such as territorial integrity? It also contrasts the political autonomy theory with two alternatives: the liberal nationalist theory and the peoplehood theory.

Legitimacy and Self-Determination

This chapter turns to the question of how a state might acquire legitimate territorial jurisdiction over a population of rightful occupants. What gives a state the right to rule a specific territory and group of people? I hold that a state has a right to rule a territory and population if and only if it: (i) protects certain essential private rights for all its subjects and respects these rights in outsiders and (ii) it reflects the shared will of its population as to how—and by whom—they should be ruled. To gain the right to rule, a state must serve the second and third core values that underpin the states system: basic justice and collective self-determination. The chapter offers a specific account of the interest in collective self-determination, which it calls “the political autonomy theory.”

Challenges to Occupancy

This chapter considers two important challenges to occupancy rights. First, how might we legitimately move from a scenario where the earth’s spaces are freely available to all to one where some people hold special rights over certain areas? Is this—as some cosmopolitans argue—simply the usurpation of resources that rightfully should remain open to everyone? Second, most states have acquired (parts of) their territories through invasion, displacement, conquest, and other past injustices. Can present-day occupants claim foundational title to the spaces they now inhabit? Even if the earth is owned in common, I argue that there is nothing wrong with people asserting claims to specific areas of it, so long as they respect the fair-use proviso. This chapter also argues that present-day occupancy rights do not depend on a historically “clean” chain of title. Since occupancy rights can often be established in the aftermath of historic dispossession, an unjust past does not necessarily invalidate present-day occupancy.

Resource Sovereignty and International Responsibilities

Among the territorial rights states claim is the exclusive right to control, regulate, and manage the natural resources found within their territories, and sometimes to profit from their sale or taxation. This chapter investigates states’ sovereignty claims over natural resources. It defends a resource-sovereignty principle different from the permanent sovereignty doctrine as it exists in international law. The proposed alternative principle is primarily about jurisdiction, not ownership: it is a right to control resource management decisions. By investigating the case of forest conservation, the chapter also argues that in the case of certain global systemic resources, resource sovereignty should be constrained by duties of environmental justice that require cooperation in international institutions.

Introduction: The Normative Bases for Territorial Sovereignty

This chapter introduces the two main questions with which this book is concerned. First, is there any compelling moral justification for organizing our world as a territorial states system or is this mode of organization just a firmly rooted historical contingency? Second, how might a state demonstrate a right to control a population and geographical area within that system, especially in the face of challenges from foreign powers or separatist groups who dispute its title? The chapter introduces the three core values that ground the account of territorial sovereignty, occupancy, basic justice, and collective self-determination, and it distinguishes the book’s position from alternative views.