States as Agents and as Trustees

In The Shifting Border, Ayelet Shachar observes that the ‘beast’ of state migration policy has broken out of its cage and shifted both outward – to intercept migrants before they can ‘touch base’ and thereby gain rights – and inward, to restrict and subvert the rights of migrants and others in Exclusionary Zones within state territory. Shachar wants to ‘tame’ the beast by obligating states and their agents to uphold basic rights wherever they act. The current article first questions whether this ‘beast’ is necessarily monstrous, or whether it is not an admittedly excessive response to understandable challenges that arise due to the passivity of territorial states in the face of external forces. The article then suggests that the better response to this passivity is for states to embrace their legitimating function of trusteeship for the people (or moral patients) of the world as a whole.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative

The Belt and Road initiative announced by China’s President Xi Jinping has introduced a novel economic model that seeks to shift the site and purpose of development outside China. The initiative proposes the construction of a series of transportation platforms along the ancient Silk Road that connected China with Central Asia, Europe and West Asia. This outward thrust of investment and capital construction envisages significant reduction of distance and in spatial barriers between and China and the world that will form the road traversing different geographies of nations, territories and cultures. I call China’s Belt and Road initiative a transnational development model as it aims to coordinate factors of economic circulation across different national spaces controlled by different governance models, legal norms and political contingencies. Centuries ago when the original trading route of the Chinese Silk Road was formed, this overland route was a contiguous territory where boundaries remained too fluid for any authorities to impose its will. But today the Silk Road is an imagined geography as this route is controlled by sovereign national territorial states having effective authority structures over each of these units. The initiative then requires China to entail a broad-based economic coordination with a diverse governance systems. My paper will explore how the transnational scope of the Belt and Road initiative come to negotiate diverse authority structures in particular national contexts.

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

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.

Vectorizing maps to generate geo-spatial data on territories of the Holy Roman Empire

Geo-spatial factors were a major driving force for the European Reformation.Power relations between neighboring territorial states, travel routes of scholars,and locations of cultural exchange contributed to the spread of Protestantism.However, researchers cannot study these factors quantitatively because spatialdata on territories in the 16th century does not exist. I develop a manual andan automatic method to extract the geo-coordinates of territories from politicalmaps and enrich them with non-spatial attributes gathered from Wikipedia. Themanual method extracts unambiguous territories and the automatic method is re-producible and time saving. The generated data can be used to study confessional-ization and other aspects of the Reformation. The methodology can be generalizedto other geographic areas and historical periods.

Legal Pluralism in Historical Context

This chapter presents a historical context of legal pluralism. A pivotal shift of the past several centuries has been from law attached to a person's community toward territorial states that claim a monopoly over law—a long-term project that has always been marked by major exceptions and has never been fully completed. Prior to this shift, the widely held view, now largely forgotten, is that everyone was entitled to be judged by the law of their community, called “personal law” at the time because it attaches to each person, though the chapter descriptively labels this “community law” to enable comparisons to other contexts. The first step is to understand empires, which are cauldrons of legal pluralism, using the Roman Empire as an example. The chapter then covers legal pluralism during the High Middle Ages, followed by the slow process by which the state gradually crystallized, absorbing other forms of law within its ambit, though not entirely. It also addresses three legally plural contexts in the early modern period into the twentieth century: the millet system in the Ottoman Empire, extraterritoriality, and the plural legal system entrenched in India by the British East India Company.

To the History of International Law: the Property Rights of the Citizens of Local Centres of Italy in the 14th and 15th Centuries in Foreign Territory

This paper considers what the archival material of the 14th and 15th centuries can tell us about this question: how and to what extent the rights of the inhabitants of certain northern Italian cities (Ferrara, Cremona, Padua and Venice) were protected if their property was located in foreign territory and/or their property interests could be restricted by the power structures of another Italian centre. The first problem concerned the property of the Church. A study of the documentary material shows that one way of preserving the property of the Church on foreign territory, despite the increasing tendency of secular rulers to seize church lands, was to place it in possession of the local population on a secure basis - emphyteusis, livelles, or other type of long-term use. The second problem was enforcing the contracts, i.e. suing the party which had not fulfilled or improperly fulfilled their terms if the infringer was on foreign soil. The records show that this was most probably enshrined in agreements between the Italian city-states and was incorporated by means of a special formula in the treaties. The third problem was related to the property rights of the inhabitants of medieval Italy, whose real estate, together with the territory in which it was situated, passed under the jurisdiction of another ruler. A study of the lettere ducali shows that such legal relations were based on treaties between the rulers of Italian territorial states and became the subject of diplomatic correspondence

Die geographischen Grenzen abstrakter Gleichheit

Equality, a concept so central to democratic societies, is being scrutinized in a critical manner in this paper. It argues that the spatial borders of territorial states are also the limits of the validity of the principle of abstract equality, of its ideological productivity as well as its emancipatory potential. The paper discusses the Marxist critique of the limitations of the merely abstract, formal understanding of equality that is inscribed into the structures of democratic states, and the ways in which both the Marxist tradition and current theories of radical democracy find an emancipatory potential in the demand for abstract equality that makes possible going beyond its very abstractions. The focus of these discussions is on how spatiality is integrated into theories of radical democracy on the level of theory. The paper suggests that combining the insights on the productivity of spatial forms from discussions in human geography with the critique of merely abstract equality is a decidedly geographical contribution to the development of theories of the political.

Transition to Colonialism

The eighteenth-century economy of the Indian subcontinent was an uneven one. On the one hand, there were present a rich indigenous commercial tradition; territorial states that respected private property in land and trade; a literate elite running the fiscal administration; and rich cities that were home to highly skilled artisans. But much of that wealth was confined to the riparian, deltaic, and seaboard regions. The greater part of peninsular India consisted of drylands, poor peasants, few roads, slow traffic, few towns, forests, waterless uplands, and uninhabited deserts. With such divergent initial conditions, the onset of globalization and the emergence of British power led to a variety of trajectories, as Chapter 2 shows.