On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place

ISBN-13: 9780190074203 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 344 str.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo (Associate Professo

Opis

When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities-but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls. To escape all this, On Borders presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions-not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.

Recenzje

On Borders is itself a watershed in the political theory of territory, of migration, and of the interactions between human institutions and the natural world. Paulina Ochoa Espejo reframes our picture of the state and its relationship to its members and the places they live and work. Her originality is grounded in both deep insight as well as extensive and careful research across several disciplines. It is political theory for the 21st century.

O autorze

Paulina Ochoa Espejo is Associate Professor of Political Science at Haverford College. She is the author of The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Populism.