Property, Territory, Sovereignty: the justification of political boundaries

How can political boundaries be justified? My main aim in this chapter is to explore the territorial dimensions of early modern accounts of sovereignty. In so doing, however, my approach is deliberately both historical and normative. Tracing the historical lineage of state territoriality helps shed light, I believe, on contemporary struggles over political boundaries. Why care about excavating a principle of territoriality in the first place? It has become almost a commonplace of contemporary political science and political philosophy that we live in an increasingly de-territorialised world, given the intensification of the forces of globalisation. But political boundaries remain and are fought over. If sovereignty is being increasingly dispersed and as a result boundaries blurred, then we still need an account of the nature of these emergent boundaries, of the forms of re-territorialisation taking place. One step along that path is to understand the conceptual tools we have inherited and which continue to shape our thinking about the relation between sovereignty and territory.