Territorial sovereignty and humankind's common heritage ☆

Introduction Anna Stilz's Territorial Sovereignty covers an impressively wide terrain, from the state's right to rule over a territory to the right to secede, from cultural neutrality to equitable access to natural resources, from collective self-determination to cooperation with international institutions, from coercive to noncoercive responses to the commission of injustice. In this paper, I examine Stilz's account and defence of territorial sovereignty in the light of the view that there are landmarks (monuments, geological structures, and landscapes) which are located in and subject to the jurisdiction of sovereign states, but which are deemed to be of outstanding value to humankind as a whole, irrespective of whatever economic value they might have. Put differently, I am interested in bringing Stilz's account to bear on the notion of humankind's common heritage. I stress ‘heritage’, for quite often, humankind is said to own global systemic systems such as transboundary rivers and forests, species, unoccupied areas of the earth such as Antarctica and the oceans, whose value partly reside in the fact that they contain extractable natural resources. The question of who, if anyone, has rights over natural resources with extractive value is attracting growing interest in the contemporary political philosophy of territory, justice, and natural resources. By ‘heritage', however, I have in mind something else: I mean that which we inherit from our ancestors, which we value here and now and which we seek to transmit to our successors for reasons which have nothing to do with its extractive value. The question of who, if anyone, has rights over humankind's common heritage thus understood is largely neglected. To the extent that contemporary moral and political philosophy addresses interests outsiders might have in the state's decisions regarding its territory, it focuses on would-be migrants (who have an interest in establishing residence on that territory) or on those individuals who are affected by the state's decisions with respect to its natural resources. It does not consider interests they might have in those landmarks which there are independent reasons to believe (more on which below) are part of humankind's common heritage. This particular question the value of, and our duties towards, humankind's common heritage suffers from serious neglect in moral and political philosophy. If only for this reason, it is worth examining in its own right: that is one of my aims here. (I offer a fuller treatment in Fabre 2021.) My other aim is to show what a singularly sophisticated and illuminating defence of territorial rights might tell us about it.