Territory as Deep Diversity in Global Justice

Abstract

Cosmopolitan political theorists, like the statists they have superseded, have failed to develop plausible principles of territorial distributive justice. One reason for this is the focus on distributive egalitarianism, which presupposes comparability; but the diversity of relationships between people and land renders landholdings incommensurable across cultures. Territorial claims introduce deep diversity into the theory of global justice. It is argued here that this deep diversity derails cosmopolitans because they assume and universalize a culturally specific ontology of land, or “ethnogeography.” This ethnogeography, shared by Locke, Dworkin, and the mainstream of Anglo-American political thought in between, treats land as the passive and intrinsically worthless object of human activity. The result of universalizing this ethnogeography is to obscure all non-market values in land, hence mismeasuring land holdings and forcing people off their land. Against this ethnogeography, it is argued here that people and land interact in mutually formative ways. After briefly describing four alternative ontologies of land, the paper develops a strategy for resolving territorial disputes across ethnogeographies. This strategy could achieve territorial justice across deeply diverse, yet dynamic, patterns of land-use, and opens the way for a less-parochial cosmopolitanism.