A human right to political membership & the right to territory

Abstract

The global justice debates frame the right to political membership and territorial rights by focusing on stateless individuals/refugees as claimants of the former and sovereign states as the claimants of the latter. Kant’s Right to Hospitality is often employed to reinforce this mode of framing rights. However, this mode of framing rights can lead to possible neglect of a people as an equally important right claimant. I employ a context-oriented interpretation of Kant’s right to Hospitality to highlight the non-state people’s claims to political membership and territory. I suggest that in Kant, while the non-state people are not in a civil condition, we can nevertheless recognize their provisional claims to the territory, which are forceful enough to exclude outsiders. Furthermore, the non-state people cannot be forced into a political membership with us or each other because we do not know the nature of obligations they may have towards each other. Recognizing these limits of our understanding can encourage philosophically thought-out modes of reframing indigenous people’s claims in our theoretical debates. In practice, it can promote an insightful attitude in negotiating their terms of political membership and land claims against the sovereign states.