Cet article propose une analyse du contexte québécois, actuellement marqué par une prolifération des titres miniers visant des minéraux critiques. Nous examinons la thèse selon laquelle nous aurions une obligation morale d'exploiter le territoire en vue de la transition énergétique. Selon cette idée mise de l'avant notamment par l'industrie minière et le gouvernement provincial québécois, l'opposition des communautés locales à l’égard des projets miniers serait un cas de « NIMBY ». Pour répondre à cette accusation, cet article propose une réflexion sur le rapport qu'entretiennent les communautés politiques avec le territoire à partir des travaux de Margaret Moore, de Cara Nine, et d'intuitions provenant de la Green Legal Theory. Cet article conclut en un droit prima facie des communautés locales de ne pas exploiter les minéraux critiques sur leur territoire.

This essay argues that we have a duty to protect biodiversity hotspots, rooted in an argument about the wrongful imposition of risk and intergenerational justice. State authority over territory and resources is not unlimited; the state has a duty to protect these areas. The essay argues that although biodiversity loss is a global problem, it can be tackled at the domestic level through clear rules. The argument thus challenges the usual view of state sovereignty, which holds that authority over territory, resources, and migration (all of which are connected to the protection of biodiversity hotspots) is unlimited.

Although Indigenous Peoples' rights to own, control and manage their lands and territories are well established under international law, Indigenous Peoples affected by forest conservation and climate protection programmes continue to denounce interventions that fail to uphold their rights. This article focuses on the internationally funded Visión Amazonía REDD Early Movers programme in the Colombian Amazon. Drawing on observations and critiques by Indigenous rightsholders in the Middle Caquetá River and human rights insights from a legal complaint raised by one Indigenous community against the programme, we demonstrate the programme's inadequate protection of collective rights, especially relating to the fundamental right to free, prior and informed consent and the resulting inequitable benefit sharing. We focus on conflicting views between Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors over the definition of direct effects on Indigenous Peoples (which triggers the requirement for prior consultation and consent), the basis for inclusion of Indigenous Peoples as programme beneficiaries, and the role accorded to Indigenous science in such programmes. Notions of permission and consent in the customary law and economic practices of the concerned Indigenous Peoples are central to the conviviality and reproduction of human and non-human societies within their territories. To ensure more accountable and sustainable international environmental finance and conservation interventions, and to ensure respect for Indigenous Peoples' self-determination and territorial and cultural rights, we recommend that these initiatives adopt human rights-based, pluri-legal and intercultural approaches centring on the right to free, prior and informed consent as a structuring principle. Additionally, we call for more robust measures in forest and climate protection programmes, to recognize and respect customary law, collective property, traditional livelihoods and Indigenous science.

This article examines the Wet'suwet’en people's struggle for territorial control over their traditional homeland from the normative perspective of collective self-determination. I focus on two interlocking philosophical questions that arise in examination of the case: the justification for a group's right to control territory and the justification for the right of political institutions and officials within those institutions to make and enforce law for the occupants of the territory. I argue that, pursuant to the collective self-determination theory of territorial rights, the legitimate representatives of the Wet'suwet’en people must reflect the people's shared will. After describing the traditional governance system of the Wet'suwet’en people, I argue that there is nothing in principle preventing the hereditary chiefs from reflecting the shared will of the Wet'suwet’en people (as I argue electoral democracy is not always necessary for collective self-determination). I illustrate several reasons why hereditary leaders could reflect the shared will of Wet'suwet’en people better than alternative political authorities, while demonstrating that the political authority of any Wet'suwet’en governance system depends upon the actual endorsement of Wet'suwet’en people themselves.

This article examines whether discovery could, contrary to common philosophical opinion, be taken seriously as a ground of territorial rights. I focus on the discovery of uninhabitable lands such as found in the Arctic. After surveying the role of discovery in Roman private law and modern international law, I turn to Locke's well-known theory or original acquisition. I argue that many of the justifications that do the work in Locke's theory also apply to discovery. I then discuss some of the many reasons why discovery may seem unpromising as a ground of original acquisition. I close by arguing that if there is a bridge mechanism by which property can legitimately transform into territory and if, at least in some circumstances, discovery can produce property rights, then it would follow that in some circumstances discovery could also produce territorial rights.

This article is interested in the general question of what justifies territorial rights over unoccupied places, including places that are not occupied but are situated within the territorial borders of a state. This question arises because one of the most common defenses of rights over territory makes use of the idea of occupancy and has difficulty explaining such rights in places that are not occupied. It explores this question through an examination of the claims and arguments in the Canadian Arctic, which provides an historically specific test case for the merits and plausibility of the various arguments appealed to. It argues that territorial rights in unoccupied places, including the Canadian Arctic, are justified on different grounds than in occupied parts of the territory, and that the justification also affects the kinds of rights—particularly over resources—that such states can claim.

This article examines the role of spatial shape in the justification, practice, and study of territorial claims, focusing in particular on the concepts of contiguity and compactness. A territory is contiguous if all parts are connected to all other parts, and a territory is compact if all its parts are closely joined or densely packed spatially. Shaping territories to be contiguous and compact is often implicitly taken to be a worthwhile goal, in both empirical and normative assessments of territorial claims. This article focuses directly on these two concepts, taking a novel approach to the study of territory by raising questions about these foundational, but often unexamined, background assumptions. Interrogating territorial shape thus provides a useful means of examining arguments about the justice or legitimacy of the territorial rights attributed to states or peoples. The contingent origins of the concepts of contiguity and compactness suggest that evaluations of territorial shape have sometimes been based on an implicit affective ‘feel’ or emotional reaction as much as on logical or empirical argument. This conclusion allows us to rethink some of our unstated assumptions about the shapes of states and other political territories, and thus to reconsider the justice or legitimacy attributed to those claims.

Is territory a trap? Does the concept of territory trap us into false assumptions of internally homogeneous, externally bounded political communities that exercise uniform sovereignty across their domain? Against the background of debates about territory and the territorial state in international relations, this symposium brings together five contributions in political theory that advance a nuanced and systemic understanding of what territory is. Taken together, they indicate that there is much to the territorial paradigm beyond the modern, sovereign, and territorial state model. There are diverse conceptions of territory, which may be relevant across different legal and political orders. The various conceptual analyses of territory in this symposium suggest that the sovereign state model is only one way in which a sovereign political authority can be territorial. These essays provide the conceptual tools to formulate (and subsequently test) the hypothesis that the transformations in statehood may not be best described in terms of the rise and decline of territorial sovereignty, but as moves from one model of territorially bounded political authority to another. In political theory, it is only in recent years that this foundational concept has received sustained attention from political theorists. This symposium aims to take forward this welcome theoretical development.