On the Normative Foundations of Territorial Sovereignty: A New Critical Approach
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Benhabib, Seyla
Abstract
This dissertation is a social-philosophical critique of the normative foundations of territorial sovereignty, engaging John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Aristotle, Carl Schmitt, and more contemporary thinkers in ecological politics, human geography, the political theory of territory, legal theory, and Maōri phenomenology. I reconstruct the normative foundations of territorial sovereignty from three primary viewpoints—first, through its internal structure in early modern social contract theory; second, through the phenomenology of nature that underlies it; and third, through its spatio-political logic as formalized in the territorial system of nation-states. My core contention is that in framing territorial sovereignty largely in terms its social-associational logic, we have overlooked that its normative structure is tied to a distinctive—and parochial—conception of land, water, and air with ontological, phenomenological, and political dimensions. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I argue that the concept of territorial right is predicated on a distinctly propertarian ontology of land, water, and air—what I call ‘natural space’—that ascribes three qualities to them: divisibility, tameability, and ownness. I trace how this propertarian ontology emerges from Roman law distinction between imperium and dominium and becomes embedded in early modern conceptions of territorial right, focusing on the work of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant. Second, I trace this propertarian ontology to its core phenomenology—what I called givenness—through which we imagine that the natural world is always and already given for-us in phenomenal experience prior to justification. Drawing on conceptual resources in Maōri cosmology, Hegel’s philosophy of nature, critical ecology, and emerging climate science, I particularize givenness by outlining the contours of an alternative phenomenology of nature—what I call relational otherness—in which the world is not only for-us, but also in-us and beyond-us. I argue that relational otherness reveals key ontic qualities of land, water, and air—namely, their fluidity, unruliness, and interdependence—that its propertarian alternative obscures. Third, drawing on Aristotle, Schmitt, Heidegger, and the work of contemporary human geographers, I reframe territorial sovereignty as a logic of emplacement through a broader philosophical analysis of the equivocal relationship between politics and place. My main contention is that territorial sovereignty engenders a logic of emplacement that is predicated on territorial containment, and thus on the displacement of what I call mobile forms of life. Thematizing contemporary nomadism as a frame of reference—and in dialogue with contemporary anthropology—I explore various ways in which the logic of territorial containment is sedimented in political theory and international law, closing with reflections on how climate-related displacement is indeterminately forcing a reassessment of the place-politics relationship universalized by the global territorial order of political modernity. To conclude, I reflect widely on both the methodological and normative horizons of my approach in the context of existing debates on territorial sovereignty and forced displacement in political theory, highlighting the importance of developing new normative approaches to decouple mobility from rightlessness.
Recommended Citation
Nathwani, Nishin, "On the Normative Foundations of Territorial Sovereignty: A New Critical Approach" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1329.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1329
