Margaret Moore's "A Political Theory of Territory"

Margaret Moore is Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University (Canada). She is the author of Foundations of Liberalism and Ethics of Nationalism.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Political Theory of Territory, and reported the following:

Page 99 is not fully representative – it’s a critique of someone else’s account of territory. To be more a more representative page, it would have to articulate my own theory of territory. My theory argues that the right-holding agent (the holder of rights over territory) is the people, and the state is the mechanism by which the people are self-determining. I justify the idea of territory or having territorial rights in terms of the moral value of self-determination.

The book argues in favour of a world divided up in territorial units, as I understand them, both against people who are against territory, and against people who hold a different theory of territory. I apply that theory to a range of problems linked to territory, all of which are now dealt with in an ad hoc way: disputes over natural resources, disputes over boundaries, unoccupied islands, the ocean, the Arctic, and disputes rooted in historic injustice with regard to land; and secessionist conflicts.

Learn more about A Political Theory of Territory at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue