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Taking up space on earth: Theorizing territorial rights, the justification of states and immigration from a global standpoint

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2015

MATHIAS RISSE
MATHIAS RISSE*
Affiliation:
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The author’s 2012 book On Global Justice gives pride of place to the idea that humanity collectively owns the earth. Independently, there has been a flourishing literature on the justification of rights to territory. Central to this discussion are a Kantian and a Lockean approach. This paper recapitulates the author’s approach to humanity’s collective ownership of the earth and argues that, properly understood, both of those approaches should integrate the global standpoint constituted thereby. However, the goal here is not to amend the Kantian and Lockean approaches to territory, but to refute them. To that end the paper also argues that both approaches endorse an unacceptably strong view of the justifiability of states and should therefore be rejected. The view in On Global Justice emerges vindicated, according to which territorial rights, the justification of states and immigration all need to be theorized together, and need to be theorized from a genuinely global standpoint.

Keywords

global justiceimmigrationKantLocketerritory
Type
Research Article
Information
Global Constitutionalism , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 81 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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