The Research Group on Global Justice welcomes Anna Stilz (Princeton), for a presentation entitled “Climate Migration and Territorial Justice”.

1:00-2:30 pm, Friday, March 11

*Stilz will only talk for 10-15 minutes, in order to ensure more time for providing comments and feedback. So please read the paper in advance.*

*Please register with lincentre@mcgill.ca and indicate whether you will attend in person or via zoom.*

Bio

Anna Stilz is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Her research interests include the history of political thought (particularly the 17th-18th Centuries); nationalism; political obligation, authority, and state legitimacy; rights to territory; and theories of collective agency.  Her books include Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (2009), and Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (2019).   She is the current Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy and Public Affairs.

Abstract

Since climate change compromises the carrying capacity of the earth, it sharply raises the question of territorial justice. How should the earth’s remaining habitable spaces be distributed? This paper argues that we should conceive the aim of territorial justice as that of constituting an equal status – that of common possessor of the globe. I argue that earth-dwellers will enjoy this status if three core territorial rights – to occupancy, basic justice, and self-determination – are recognized universally, and the global distribution of territory is organized to ensure that these rights are robustly guaranteed for all. I apply this account to generate duties of territorial justice under conditions of climate change: what do we owe people whose continued capacity to live in their territories is under threat? I argue that those states historically responsible for climate change have duties of adaptation, migration, redistribution, and compensation toward groups whose territory’s carrying capacity is threatened or damaged.