Sharing Ecosystems

This chapter offers a moral explanation for why bordering states should share the governance of transborder rivers on the basis of place-specific duties; the argument can also be extended to other natural resources. The chapter offers a view of water governance that mediates between a universalist view based on a human right to water and an exclusivist view grounded on the principle of self-determination. The chapter offers the example of the river Grande (Bravo) on the U.S.-Mexico border, and argues that the obligation to share the governance of transborder rivers comes from duties to the complex systems that sustain life (including human life) in the natural water basin. These obligations overlap and crisscross the current border.

How Place-Specific Duties Make Borders Morally Relevant

Many people today hold that borders are morally arbitrary, and therefore we should seek a world without borders. This chapter challenges this view. It holds that borders matter morally because bounded jurisdictions sustain liberal rights, which are still the most effective means to resist oppression. However, the chapter argues, the value of borders does not come from grounding equal rights among the members of a group defined by identity, instead what defines the scope of right is place. The chapter examines the idea of place and place-specific duties. The chapter argues that rights cannot be upheld unless the beneficiaries participate in common institutions with others, and a necessary part of these institutions is indexed to place rather than identity. Such institutions, including the rule of law, are embodied and require specific local practices of cooperation. This explains why we need borders to coordinate action in modern societies marked by pluralism.

Natural Borders

This chapter explores the historical idea of natural borders. Territories have been imagined as being naturally separated from one another by oceans, rivers, deserts, and mountains. Although most geographers today agree that natural borders are a myth, one of the central ideas in contemporary theories of border legitimacy (the concept of self-determination) still relies on the natural borders of states. This chapter makes two points. It first argues that seeking the natural borders of democracy on the basis of identity is a mistake. The chapter’s second point is more controversial: despite natural borders’ problematic history, I argue that we should endorse a specific type of natural border—a socio-ecological version of territorial politics centered on resilience—because we need it to deal with climate change, and because it can be a solution to the “boundary problem”: a logical circularity that makes democratic legitimacy impossible.

The Watershed

Borders stability is desirable, but if borders had to be redrawn, what principle should be used to do so? Existing principles conflict: Uti possidetis favors the status quo, while the principle of self-determination is revisionist and favors unified peoples, and political cosmopolitanism seeks to undo borders altogether. This chapter offers an alternative: the Watershed Model of territorial politics, which draws borders around places. The model uses place-specific duties to identify non-state and nonmarket local cooperative institutions of resource use (specifically water) as a template to draw local political borders. The local institutions used for border drawing are intrinsically connected to geographic features, which means that border plebiscites do not fall into the same circularity as under the principle of self-determination. The Watershed Model, moreover, uses water conservation as a principle that those inside and outside the border could accept, because water conservation is both a universal and a local (and context-sensitive) value.

What Do Borders Divide?

This chapter examines contemporary border theories. What do borders divide? An important account holds that borders’ main function is to exclude and separate: borders divide peoples or geographical areas. However, critical border scholars have argued that borders do not in fact divide; they are not “lines in the sand.” Rather than separations, borders are zones and practices that extend within and beyond territorial limits: they are everywhere. This chapter rejects both these accounts, which rely on sovereignty and determine the unity of the state in contrast with the outside: aliens, foreign countries, and exceptional legal decisions. The chapter maintains that borders do not divide peoples, geographical spaces, or flows: insofar as they divide, they divide jurisdictions. This distinction matters theoretically, because unlike sovereign territories, jurisdictions make legal spaces through practice; they do not make claims about the people’s identity, territorial integrity, or the legitimacy of rule.

Envoi

Are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? This short envoi summarizes On Borders, which proposes the Watershed Model, and answers the book’s central questions as follows: First, borders are justified when they sustain place-specific duties. Second, border control rights spring from international conventions, not from internal legitimacy—so border institutions should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and by the states system. Finally, any border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. It concludes by asking where new research on borders in times of climate change should lead.

Immigration

How should liberal democracies treat noncitizens who are already physically present in their territory? This chapter holds that immigrants should get rights because they are here. Immigration scholars fear that this approach leads to the “soft inside, hard outside” view. If presence gives rights to immigrants (soft inside), current members have a strong incentive to keep newcomers out to protect the group’s identity (hard outside). However, when citizenship relies on respecting place-specific duties, it is possible to detach citizens’ rights from group identity. This makes citizenship compatible with wider mobility and even open borders. The chapter argues that anyone present in a territory has a right to stay because their presence is a condition for current citizens to fulfill their duties to third parties, but the state has a limited right to deny entry to those who would not be able to fulfill their place-specific duties when they enter.

What Is Wrong with Border Walls?

This chapter asks what is wrong with fortified borders. Several scholars have argued that states do not use fortified borders to stop illegal crossings; instead, they use them to divert those flows to more dangerous illegal crossing spots. This chapter analyzes this trend, by using the example of the U.S.-Mexico border and subjecting it to a proportionality test. It questions whether flow diversion is a legitimate goal, whether less intrusive alternatives are available, and whether the policy imposes high burdens on rights bearers. The chapter claims that to the extent that the strategy works by harming some people in order to send a threatening message to others, the practice is unjustified. When states rely on harms to send a message, they purposely seek to harm would-be crossers—and this chapter argues that such harm is not proportional to the goods achieved in fortifying the border against civilian crossers.

Grounds of Border Control and Shared Border Governance

Who has a right to control borders? Political philosophers divide territorial rights into a right of jurisdiction, a right to use resources, and a right to control borders. However, they focus on the first right, because they think that both the second and third flow from it. This chapter argues that territorial rights are fundamentally plural: the right to border control is independent from the other territorial rights. This pluralist thesis enables an alternative analysis of the right to control borders: specifying their objects, proper site, scope, institutions, duty bearers, and holders. The chapter also shows that border control rights have a different grounding than the rights to jurisdiction and to natural resources. While the latter may be grounded in internal legitimacy, the former are grounded in international conventions and place-specific obligations, indicating that borders require shared and reciprocal governance by adjoining countries and the international system.

The Topian Tradition

Are there existing resources in the history of political thought to refocus current political relations to the environment? This chapter argues that parallel to the utopian idea of territorial rights, there is a Topian tradition that deals with the topographical and climatic conditions that make different forms of political organization possible. This tradition aims to discover the social qualities needed to sustain different types of governments, and how climate, topography, and local economy influence these traits. The tradition is characterized by its localism, context-sensitivity of principles, and realism. The chapter examines the arguments of four notable Topian thinkers: Montesquieu, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Kant. Topian thinking can offer alternative ways of looking at problems of borders and border management that have become impasses in debates about territorial rights.