The Unbundling of Sovereignty: Justice, Jurisdiction, and Territorial Rights

Abstract

In international law and international relations, sovereign territoriality remains the dominant and mostly unchallenged principle delineating the sphere of political authority and rights of jurisdiction, territorial rights, and rights over natural resources. Along with other sovereign rights and immunities (non-intervention, international law making), they are allocated to collectives defined and demarcated by historically contingent principle of sovereign territoriality. Moreover, these rights come with an extensive bundle of powers, prerogatives, and immunities which exclude intra-state or beyond-state actors from making any claims to political autonomy, territorial control, and ownership of resources within the borders of existing sovereign territorial units. Political theory and philosophy of global justice have both grown increasingly suspicious of the justifiability of this exclusive and monistic notion of territorial sovereignty, of its contingent and arbitrary boundaries, and its implying limitless rights to political jurisdiction, territorial rights, and ownership of natural resources. While they provided critiques of territorial sovereignty and outlined moral alternatives (theories and conceptions of the right to self-determination, territorial rights, rights to natural resources), only few of them have come up with ideas how to unbundle these rights territorially from one another and in terms of an extensive set of powers they confer on their holders (e.g. Moore 2015, Armstrong 2017). The existing debate in democratic theory about the makeup, boundaries, and about who, why and when should be included into the demos – and the refusal to take the pre-given demoi of existing states for granted – has not been linked to these issues. In light of pressing political and environmental problems (e.g. reclaiming sovereignty movements, claims for non-sovereign control over territory and resources by indigenous groups or the necessity to pool or share sovereignty over natural resources in regimes of international cooperation or protection), this panel aims to discuss the newest developments in the debate about “unbundling” of territorial sovereignty and about the scope, the content, and incidents of rights to political jurisdiction, territorial rights, and rights to natural resources.