Avery Kolers

I like to consume political philosophy which is distant from moral philosophy. This book fit the bill quite well since it certainly offers something more than moral theory. As the subtitle advertises, the author constructs a political theory of territory. He builds a theory of land claims made by "ethnogeographic communities" and writes that territorial rights should accrue to such communities rather than to "nations" or "peoples". A second key concept is the empirical or intentional "plenitude" that can supposedly be objectively attributed to any land claim that an ethnographic community makes. Plenitude is intended to be a multifaceted concept which for example allows the land claim of a nomadic pastoralist to be fairly compared to the claim of a modern industrialist.

Philosophers like to note the "work" that a theoretical construction performs or fails to perform in a given argument. On that note, it is clear that the notion of "plenitude" carries almost the entire workload in this argument. The author builds a list of seven different kinds of land claims and notes for each kind what kind of plenitude must be shown in order for the claim to be valid. This is a reasonably interesting discussion because it highlights different claim varieties from a neutral vantage point. The author argues that traditional cosmopolitan political theory, where nations or peoples are treated as sovereign entities with equal rights, is typically not able to treat such claims in an equal manner.

That criticism might be true, but it must still be said that it is hopelessly unclear how "plenitude" and the "ethnographic community" can be given any practical content. Stating that plenitude is an objective concept does not make it so, and musing about ecologically enlightened communities of like-minded folks does not bring them into existence in the real world. A lot more thought would have to be put into explicating these new theoretical concepts than what is presented in this book if they are to have any meaning. Nevertheless, despite falling a bit short on the conceptual front, this book still manages to present a reasonably interesting analysis of land claims which should provide food for further thought for those who are interested in this topic.… (altro)