The Object-Possession Trap: A Critique of Territorial Right

• In Event: Zones of Sovereignty? Territoriality and Spatial Governance

Abstract

This essay proposes a new critique of exclusive land rights. I argue that traditional theories of territorial right (e.g. Grotius, Locke, Kant) rely on an erroneous argument about freedom and possession. They argue that (1) humans have a universal right to self-preservation (survival); (2) self-preservation requires that we appropriate objects (land, resources) necessary for our survival; and (3) it is therefore necessary, for both self-preservation and freedom, to possess these objects. This argument justifies a tight link between property and freedom in Lockean theories of land (Miller, Simmons), and between territorial sovereignty and freedom in Kantian theories (Stilz). Yet I argue that object possession theory is specious because (a) the land practices necessary for self-preservation do not actually require possession, and (b) freedom is undermined by posing land as an external object. Self-preservation leads to freedom, I argue, when it results from non-exclusive cooperation over land/resources, rather than possessive exclusion; furthermore, in our age of climate crisis, we ought to rethink the European conception of land as a masterable object. This critique of land possession thus renews anarchist and Marxist critiques of property with a fresh look at the micro-foundations of natural right, and offers a theory that explains the intimate connection between private property ownership and territorial sovereignty as interlocking systems of land exclusion and mastery.

Author

• Anna Jurkevics, University of British Columbia