This book deals with the following problem: Except for Antarctica, the Earth’s landmass is fully divided into countries. These areas, which we are used to seeing as different color blocks on our world maps, are distinct legal jurisdictions, with authorities that claim control over their particular populations, natural resources, and borders. But by what right do they do so? Without an answer to this question, we cannot fully address questions of justice and legitimacy, either within states or throughout the state system. Margaret Moore also considers the main subsidiary questions and debates that arise when one poses that first basic problem, namely: What exactly is territory? Who should have territory? How much should they have? When is secession justified? When is territory illegitimate? How do we allocate boundaries? Do jurisdictional rights extend to the right to control natural resources and to the right to control borders (including the right to control immigration)? Is there a right to territorial integrity? On each of these questions, there is already a significant body of recent literature. Among the virtues of A Political Theory of Territory are that it lays out and engages with this literature, and then provides a clear and coherent new set of answers to these questions.

The core of Moore’s theory of territory is that a people “has jurisdictional rights . . . over land on which members of the group reside, if the group is in [morally] legitimate occupancy of the land” (p. 35). The theory stems from the principle of collective self-determination, and the conviction that “there are important, normatively significant relationships between peoples and places” (p. 6), which Moore calls “attachments.” She justifies her position using a method similar to John Rawls’s reflective equilibrium: she examines the judgments we reach after applying her principles to specific problems, and then revises the judgments and even the principles if they do not survive after reflection.

These problems are often stylized examples taken from recent politics or history. For instance, Moore illustrates the problem of legitimate occupancy using the paradigmatic example of Sir George Somers and his crew, who settled Bermuda after a shipwreck that landed them on the desert island, early in the seventeenth century. In the author’s account, a people has jurisdictional rights because in order to be self-determining, the collective needs to have a place to call its own and a secure context that allows the people to make plans for the future. If that people originally occupies that place without having displaced anyone else, like Somers’s “people” did when they first occupied Bermuda, then the people in question have a straightforward right to make that place their territory. Indeed, the stylized model of the desert island becomes the leitmotif of Moore’s theory of territory. (Appropriately, Bermuda’s coat of arms adorns the book cover.)

With this theory in hand, Moore discusses difficult questions regarding secession, colonial settlement, and contested territories. She explains why and how the right of self-determination may be limited by the principle of reciprocity. She examines the problem of illegitimate taking of land and different options for corrective justice, eventually recognizing a right of return for individuals and peoples that “diminishes over time” (p. 158). She discusses the right to use natural resources (arguing that this is not identical to the right to jurisdiction), and when that right may be limited by distributive justice and/or self-determination. Finally, in the last chapter, the author considers whether force can be used to adjudicate territorial claims. Her argument presents a limited case for the defense of both territorial integrity and national liberation rights.

The book makes valuable contributions to all of these discussions, although I cannot discuss all of these contributions here. However, we can examine the basic assumption on which they all rest. All of Moore’s arguments turn on whether the group that exercises self-determination meets the relevant criteria of “Peoplehood.” So her book’s general argument hinges on the first question that it tackles: Who is the proper subject of territorial rights?

As mentioned, Moore’s answer is peoples. This means that the proper subject of territorial rights is a collective agent. As a collective subject of territorial rights, peoples occupy a middle ground between two other rival positions in the debate over the ground of territorial rights: On the one hand, there are cultural views, which hold that nations or similar groups have territorial rights; this view is held by scholars such as David Miller, Tamar Meisels, and Avery Kolers, and Moore discusses it in Chapter 4. On the other hand, there are statist theories of territorial rights, espoused by Allen Buchanan, Jeremy Waldron, Anna Stilz, and Lea Ypi, and discussed in Chapter 5.

There is much at stake in this debate: Political philosophers are concerned with finding the proper subject of the right because the choice can help them avoid a grave threat to the internal coherence of any self-determination theory of territory. This threat is the circularity that arises when establishing the source of legitimacy in a self-determining political community. In a self-determining polity, the people must determine the course of politics, including the design and choice of political institutions. However, these institutions are required to create citizens and, thus, the rules determining who the civic people are. So unless they choose their subject carefully, theorists face a chicken-and-egg problem: Which comes first, the civic people that creates the state or the state that creates the civic people? Is it the territory that defines the nation or the nation that defines the territory? This circularity can be an insurmountable obstacle when it comes to drawing borders or dealing with secessionist claims.

For Moore, peoples are better equipped to deal with these difficulties than are nations or states. In her view, a people is defined politically, but it is logically prior to state institutions. Two main reasons explain why this is an advantageous position to occupy: First, when the subject of rights is defined politically, it can avoid the hereditary exclusions that are so common in ethnic or national definitions of peoples (and which are very difficult to justify from the perspective of liberal democracy, which is the ultimate motivating ground of theories of self-determination). Second, when the subject of rights is not a state, it can avoid the aforementioned circularity between people and institutions. However, even though Moore’s “peoples” occupy this advantageous position in the debate, I have some concerns about her argument.

First, Moore defines peoples in terms of shared political aspirations, political capacity, and political history. However, given that there are no official or institutional mechanisms to determine what counts as belonging to the group, or defining aspirations, or the proper interpretation of history, then subjective views about “sharing” history, aspirations, and capacities for self-government do most of the work. Yet how is this “sharing” not simply a common culture by another name? And if it is not a culture, what differentiates peoples in the cases where there are two peoples subject to a common political jurisdiction? Or when individuals or groups share some aspirations and not others? Or when they differ in their accounts of what they share? In those cases, it seems impossible to determine what group counts as a people “of the right kind” using the criteria provided by Moore. This shortcoming is clear in her analysis of hard cases: for example, when the lines that separate communities do not go around (p. 118) them, as with Catholics in Northern Ireland or Muslims in Kashmir.

Second, Moore’s theory of territory depends on the concept of a civic “People,” but she spends little time analyzing it, or in referring to the extensive critical literature on the idea of the people that has proliferated in the last two decades in other areas of political theory. This omission leads her to rely too much on the ideal model of a territorial unit as an island: a clearly demarcated area that fully contains a homogenous population, all of whom belong to the same political group. This island model can be a useful counterfactual in some cases. But like other such models in political philosophy (namely, Robinson Crusoe, The Social Contract, The Veil of Ignorance), it has only limited value in dealing with difficult real-world problems, and it may introduce unstated normative assumptions through the back door. I wonder whether the island model, which generates the clear color blocks on the map, is just a useful fiction to analyze the world, or whether it is an undefended moral goal instead. At the outset, Moore states, “I find this vision of a de-territorialized world, a world held in common by all, attractive at some levels, but nevertheless I resist it” (p. 2). We never fully find out why.

Does Moore seek to legitimize state territories because the world already looks roughly like a color-coded map? Or is it because she thinks it ought to look like that? Whatever her answers to these questions, A Political Theory of Territory is a pathbreaking book: it is one of the first monographs to assess the existing literature on this issue, and to contribute an original argument on a topic that has become central to normative Anglo-American political philosophy in recent decades.