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Rights over territory are to most cosmopolitans nowadays what private property was to nineteenth-century socialists: a legally sanctioned institutionalization of theft. In the cosmopolitan imagination, territories are reminiscent of a long history of unlawful acts and their boundaries do nothing but draw arbitrary distinctions between populations. This study moves beyond this picture of territory as a mere object of domination and exploitation to offer a new perspective on the traditional cosmopolitan understanding of territory. It explores the process by which people constitute themselves as territorially defined political communities and argues that the ideal of collective self-determination incorporates a legally and politically inclusive notion of territories as non-ascriptive markers of belonging. By examining the implications of this argument, the text addresses controversial issues of contemporary political philosophy: citizenship, immigration, natural resources and, more generally, global distributive justice.
