Theorists of global justice should take an interest in territorial rights for at least three reasons. First, territorial rights may be prior to global justice goals. This would be the case if, for instance, territorial rights are natural rights. Or, if land has different meanings to different peoples, then land holdings can be compared across groups only by reference to how the group that rightfully holds the land understands its land. Either way, the completion of global justice theory requires a theory of territorial rights.
Second, even if territorial rights are posterior to or dependent on global justice, territoriality may be technologically necessary for global justice in practice. For instance, if territorial states are currently the only effective agencies for establishing justice (Christiano 2006), then achieving justice requires maintaining the conditions for state stability.
And third, questions of territoriality arise in attempts to solve nearly every major question of...
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Chris Bertram and Cara Nine for comments on drafts of this entry.
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Kolers, A. (2011). Territorial Rights. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_659
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