Description
The tension between the promise of human rights ‘everywhere’ and ‘for everyone’ with the democratic claim of ‘the people’ over its territory has long been identified in the literature. But while political theorists have tackled the challenge of the rights of others, the idea that popular legitimacy may be a power strategy to justify territorial jurisdiction, and control over resources, has not been properly addressed. That is my aim here. I argue that, in modern democracy, the demos constitutes a speech act that is central to the sovereign logic of territorial appropriation. Claiming jurisdiction over its legitimizing source – ‘the people’ – is what allows states to establish legal boundaries and territorial borders and hence exclude others from access to citizenship and/or territory. As the case of island states demonstrates, failure to do so may come at the cost of state discontinuity. Their example shows how the human rights of several populations are compromised by the impossibility of sovereign authorities to claim control over territory. As ‘vanishing states’ are forced to explore new hybrid forms of political community, they challenge the people-territory nexus that sits at the core of sovereignty. As they seek to retain territorial jurisdiction over areas (like their maritime zone) whose resources become less available to the populations that are forced to leave, they will also attempt to claim jurisdiction over their ‘landless’ people.
