Mocing Beyond the Common Ground in Normative Theories of Territory

In the last decades, political theorists have turned their attention to territorial rights and their normative justification. Two main kinds of arguments are given: connection-based arguments appeal to some relevant moral link between the territorial agents (usually a collective) and the land; and function-based arguments appeal to the goods and services that the territorial agents provide, such that territorial rights are due to them. Cosmopolitan theories, meanwhile, tend to see territorial rights with scepticism, as potentially detracting from the goal of global distributive justice. Here I suggest that, despite their differences, these theories share five methodological biases: nationalism, groupism, sedentarism, anthropocentrism, and instrumentalism. These biases are methodological because they inform the questions asked, the units of analysis, and the normative implications that follow. After showing how each of these biases is displayed by these theories, I explain why we need to move beyond them, and set some guidelines for how to do so.