Territory, self-determination, and climate change: Reflections on Anna Stilz’s Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration

Abstract

The assertion of territorial claims is one of the longest standing political issues in the world and, as the number of ongoing disputes shows, has lost none of its significance in contemporary times. Humans long for a place they can call “theirs”: whether that involves an individual being able to have a “room of one’s own” (Woolf, 1929) within a household, or being able to control the behavior of people within certain spaces and the movement of goods and people across them. Although claims to land and to territory have always featured in political philosophy, in the last decade there has been increased interest in the subject. Classic liberal political philosophy conceived of rights to territory largely as, or at least evolved from, property rights. The more recent work, to which Anna Stilz’s thought‐provoking book is a very welcome contribution, allows that there might be better ways of conceiving of people’s relationships to land and to territory than in terms of property, or at the very least not in terms of “full liberal ownership”.¹<p>

<p>It is not possible to do justice to any, let alone all of Stilz’s ideas in the space of a short commentary. Instead, I consider what Stilz’s theory has to say about how to conceive of and respond to the phenomenon of global climate change. This might seem strange to people who conceive of climate change entirely as a matter of what is going on in the atmosphere. However, climate change will not only have potentially severe impacts upon the land surface, but might, if unchecked lead to certain states, namely some of the Small Island States (SISs) losing their territory due to sea level rise. Moreover, significant proportions of the earth’s carbon sinks are located in the land and seas of different countries. To keep atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) at a manageable level, it is necessary to maintain (even create) carbon sink capacity as well as to reduce GHG emissions (e.g., by reducing fossil fuel consumption). Indeed, Stilz devotes some time in her book to both these issues. Chapter 6 discusses the rights of SISs should they become uninhabitable, and chapter 8 is devoted to management of carbon sinks. The latter half of this commentary will focus on this discussion of forest management. Before then, I wish to propose an extension to Stilz’s basic theory. In this first half of this commentary, I will suggest that as well as the “right of occupancy,” the interest in “located life plans” justifies a second pre‐institutional right. I will call this the right against nonspatial removal (right against NSR).2 The case for this right begins in the next section.