Contested Territory: A Theory of Land and Democracy Beyond Sovereign Bounds

Territorial sovereignty - the unilateral right of states to control their land and borders - is a fundamental ordering principle of contemporary politics, influencing mobility, settlement, access to land, and freedom. It has long been assumed that democracies require such territorial mastery to achieve self-determination without interference. But what if territorial sovereignty only serves the interests of conquerors and already powerful states? A sharper view of land politics in the modern era shows that territorial sovereignty has not only been established through conquest, but enables and encourages further forms of land monopolization, theft, and colonization.

Contested Territory argues that the perplexities of sovereignty should prompt us to explore alternative, non-sovereign territorial form capable of realizing the promise of democracy in the global age. To bring the potential of contested territory into focus, Jurkevics explores themes central to this tradition - land sharing, local land autonomy, legal pluralism, federation, cosmopolitan membership, and anti-colonialism - and probes their compatibility with democratic politics. The author then charts normative foundations for a cosmopolitan, democratic theory of territory. Through a critical engagement with the thought of Hannah Arendt - both her conceptualization of world-building and her rejection of sovereignty - this volume argues that it is both possible and desirable to decouple democracy and territorial sovereignty, and that by doing so we can better respond to the border-defying crises of the global age.