Conclusion: Territorial Sovereignty and Global Institutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-258
Author(s):  
Anna Stilz
Keyword(s):  
Limit State ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
World Government ◽  
Global Institutions ◽  
Multilateral Cooperation ◽  
Multilateral Institutions ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Territorial States

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.

Territorial Sovereignty

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Stilz
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
International Law ◽  
International System ◽  
Core Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Political Units ◽  
Territorial States

This book offers a qualified defense of a territorial states system. It argues that three core values—occupancy, basic justice, and collective self-determination—are served by an international system made up of self-governing, spatially defined political units. The defense is qualified because the book does not actually justify all of the sovereignty rights states currently claim and that are recognized in international law. Instead, the book proposes important changes to states’ sovereign prerogatives, particularly with respect to internal autonomy for political minorities, immigration, and natural resources. Part I of the book argues for a right of occupancy, holding that a legitimate function of the international system is to specify and protect people’s preinstitutional claims to specific geographical places. Part II turns to the question of how a state might acquire legitimate jurisdiction over a population of occupants. It argues that the state will have a right to rule a population and its territory if it satisfies conditions of basic justice and facilitates its people’s collective self-determination. Finally, Parts III and IV of this book argue that the exclusionary sovereignty rights to control over borders and natural resources that can plausibly be justified on the basis of the three core values are more limited than has traditionally been thought.

Do self-determining states have a conditional right to exclude would-be immigrants?

2021 ◽  
pp. 147488512199203
Author(s):  
Jinyu Sun
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
Border Control ◽  
Global Citizen ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
The Right ◽  
Territorial States ◽  
The Ideal

Why should (or should not) we have a system of different states that each claim both internal and external sovereignty? How can the state gain its legitimate authority to rule? What is the problem with the ideal of the ‘global citizen’? How should states respond to different groups’ secession claims? To what extent should states have the right to control their borders? If one finds such questions intriguing, one should read Anna Stilz’s book Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration. Stilz argues that a system of territorial states serves to protect important values – occupancy, basic justice and collective self-determination – which are key to living an autonomous life. I focus on the theory’s implication for the debates on border control. I contend that Stilz’s arguments still have difficulties grounding the state’s right to exclude would-be immigrants. That said, the book has done a great job in providing a liberal theoretical framework for us to reflect upon citizenship, immigration, succession claims, cosmopolitan ideals, the colonial legacy and disputes over borders and resources.

Introduction: The Normative Bases for Territorial Sovereignty

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Anna Stilz
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Area ◽  
Core Values ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Moral Justification ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
The Face ◽  
Territorial States ◽  
Separatist Groups

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.

Intervention and Collective Self-Determination

1996 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff McMahan
Keyword(s):  
Self Determination ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Ethical Dimension ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right

Intervention often violates both respect for state sovereignty and the right to self-determination. McMahan focuses on the latter ethical dimension rather than the former political and legal one, although his claims have important implications for issues of state sovereignty. He challenges the common assumption that respect for self-determination requires an almost exceptionless doctrine of nonintervention by first defining the notions of “intervention” and “self-determination,” and then analyzing Walzer's doctrine of nonintervention. The recognition that there are different ideals of self-determination results in a less rigid and more permissive doctrine of nonintervention.

Rethinking sovereignty in international fiscal policy

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 2107-2120 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER DIETSCH
Keyword(s):  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
International Law ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Modern State ◽  
State Governments

AbstractThe power to raise taxes is a sine qua non for the functioning of the modern state. Governments frequently defend the independence of their fiscal policy as a matter of sovereignty. This article challenges this defence by demonstrating that it relies on an antiquated conception of sovereignty. Instead of the Westphalian sovereignty centred on non-intervention that has long dominated relations between states, today's fiscal interdependence calls for a conception of sovereignty that assigns duties as well as rights to states. While such a circumscribed conception of sovereignty has emerged in other areas of international law in recent years, it has yet to be extended to fiscal questions. Here, these duties arguably include obligations of transparency, of respect for the fiscal choices of other countries, and of distributive justice. The resulting conception of sovereignty is one that emphasises its instrumental as well as its conditional character. Neither state sovereignty nor self-determination is an end in itself, but a means to promoting individual well-being. It is conditional in the sense that if states do not live up to their fiscal obligations towards other states, their claims to autonomy are void.

Regional Hegemony: Domination and Resistance in the Horn of Africa

1993 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Iyob
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
African Unity ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right Of Self Determination

Contested territories and challenges to state sovereignty have become almost the norm in post-colonial Africa. The nexus of many of these conflicts resides in a status quo which gives primacy to territorial integrity over the right of peoples to self-determination. The comparative advantage thus accorded to sovereign states has resulted in a disequilibrium that legitimated the violation of both regionally and internationally sanctioned rules enshrined in the Organisation of African Unity (O.A.U.) and the United Nations (U.N.). Thus a normative bias in favour of the imperative of stability and order was justified by reference to the fragility of the newly independent régimes. In the process, the right of self-determination was narrowly interpreted to refer solely to those African peoples waging liberation struggles against European colonialism or white rule.

scholarly journals The Tone of Prime Unity

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-217
Author(s):  
Will Schrimshaw
Keyword(s):  
Self Determination ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
The World ◽  
Acoustic Community ◽  
Participatory Intervention

In The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer describes a tone of ‘prime unity’, a tonal centre conditioning an international sonic unconscious. Diverging from the bucolic image of nature readily associated with Schafer’s ethics and aesthetics, this tone is found in the ubiquitous hum of electrical infrastructure and appliances. A utopian potential is ascribed to this tone in Schafer’s writing whereby it constitutes the conditions for a unified international acoustic community of listening subjects.This article outlines Schafer’s anomalous concept of the tone of prime unity and interrogates the contradictions it introduces into Schafer’s project of utopian soundscape design. Discussion of the correspondence between Schafer and Marshall McLuhan contextualises and identifies the source of Schafer’s concept of the tone of prime unity. Of particular interest is the processes of unconscious auditory influence this concept entails and its problematic relation to the politics of sonic warfare. Through discussion of contemporary artistic practices that engage with these problems, it is argued that the tone of prime unity nonetheless presents an opportunity to shift the focus of Schafer’s project from a telos of divine harmony towards collective self-determination through participatory intervention in the world around us.

Promoting Justice Across Borders

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia M. Rafanelli
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The Real ◽  
Moral Permissibility ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Degree Of Control

This book develops a theory of the ethics of “reform intervention,” a category that includes any attempt to promote justice in a society other than one’s own. It identifies several dimensions along which reform interventions can vary (the degree of control interveners exercise over recipients, the urgency of interveners’ objectives, the costs an intervention poses to recipients, and how interveners interact with recipients’ existing political institutions) and examines how these variations affect the moral permissibility of reform intervention. The book argues that, once one acknowledges the variety of forms reform intervention can take, it becomes clear that not all of them are vulnerable to the objections usually leveled against intervention. In particular, not all reform interventions treat recipients with intolerance, disrespect recipients’ legitimate institutions, or undermine recipients’ collective self-determination. Combining philosophical analysis and discussion of several real-world cases, the book investigates which kinds of reform intervention are or are not vulnerable to these objections. In so doing, it also develops new understandings of the roles toleration, legitimacy, and collective self-determination should play in global politics. After developing principles to specify when different kinds of reform interventions are morally permissible, the book investigates how these principles could be applied in the real world. Ultimately, it argues that some reform interventions are, all things considered, morally permissible and that sometimes reform intervention is morally required. It argues we should reconceive the ordinary boundaries of political activity and begin to see the pursuit of justice via political contestation as humanity’s collective project.

Introduction

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
World History ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World Region ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
History Of ◽  
Northern Atlantic ◽  
The Creation ◽  
History Of Europe

This book examines the temporality of modernity by focusing on the relations between Africa, America and Europe. More specifically, it considers the extent to which the supposed arrival of modernity in Europe affects the ways in which human beings situate themselves in time and history worldwide. It also explores how institutionally entrenched interpretations of modernity based on inequality and oppression are transformed into novel forms that are shaped by the drive to inclusive–egalitarian collective self-determination. In linking the history of Europe to world history, the book shows that what is often referred to as ‘the rise of Europe’ was the creation of an Atlantic world region with increasingly dense but highly asymmetric commercial and communicative ties. This introduction discusses the debate over the relation between the history and the theory of modernity, the connection between the Northern Atlantic West and the origins of modernity, and novel interpretations of modernity in Africa and Latin America.

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