Crises in Territorial Sovereignty: Critical Exchange on Anna Stilz’s Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration

• Author: Anna Jurkevics,Anna Stilz
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211000288
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Date: 01 October 2021
• Subject Matter: Book Symposium

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211000288

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(5) 856 –863

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211000288

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Book Symposium

Crises in Territorial

Sovereignty: Critical

Exchange on Anna Stilz’s

Territorial Sovereignty: A

Philosophical Exploration

Anna Stilz and Anna Jurkevics

Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration, by Anna Stilz. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2019, 304 pp.

Is a Revisionist Approach to Territorial

Sovereignty Viable?

Anna Stilz, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Many thanks to Anna Jurkevics for her terrific review of Territorial

Sovereignty. As Jurkevics characterizes my book, its aim is “to reshape our

vision of what the Westphalian world order could be if it were just.”1 As she

carefully notes, this does not mean I endorse the territorial states system in its

current form, though I do defend some of its central features—including the

fact that our international order is composed of independent, self-governing,

territorial units. My book instead offers a reformist account of territorial sov-

ereignty: I argue that we should institutionalize new limits to states’ sover-

eign prerogatives, in the form of internal self-determination for indigenous

peoples and minorities, and significant qualifications to the state’s exclusion-

ary rights over borders and resources.

Yet Jurkevics wonders whether these reformist aims are doomed to be

self-defeating, since the source of the “environmental, refugee, and neocolo-

nial crises” my revisionist proposals address is, in her view, “entangled in

the very system of territorial sovereignty” the book defends.2 Without a

“more radical transformation” of the states system, she believes these prob-

lems will remain insoluble.3 While Jurkevics raises other concerns—includ-

ing whether I have adequately engaged indigenous perspectives on land and

self-determination—I focus here on her central worry about the viability of

my revisionist approach.

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