On The Origin Of Commons: Understanding Divergent State Preferences Over Property Rights In New Frontiers (original) (raw)
Related papers
On the Origins of Global Commons: Non-Terrestrial Frontiers and International Property Regimes
American Political Science Association Annual Convention, 2013
This article examines variation in property rights regimes in the international system. Specifically, it asks why states maintain open access and common property rights in some international frontiers, e.g. outer space, while asserting exclusive jurisdiction in others, e.g. air space. Addressing this theoretical and historical question helps us a related question of great significance: What property rights will come to characterize today's frontiers such as cyberspace and the deep sea? To explore the origins of these divergent outcomes I investigate the nationalization of air space in the 1890s through 1920s century. I find that, contrary to conventional understanding, international property rights are contested political institutions, not environmental inevitabilities. States pursue national or common ownership in response to geopolitical considerations, specifically the distribution of power and interstate rivalry, not the nature of the frontier environment. By introducing this new conceptual category of international property rights regimes, and problematizing their political origins, the article encourages readers to question much of what we take for granted about international space, political boundaries, national property, and collective ownership.
Territories beyond possession? Antarctica and Outer Space
The Polar Journal, 2017
It is often assumed that Antarctica and Outer Space are simple, un-owned spaces. To some extent, this is correct: neither of these vast areas of our planetary environment is partitioned into standard state-sovereign spatial units. But it would be naïve to assume, therefore, that Antarctica and Outer Space are therefore exceptional, similar, uncontested spaces of “peace and science,” free from the territorial drives of states and non-state actors such as mining corporations. There are important minerals in both spaces; both spaces have significant strategic value to both states and non-state actors. This article anatomises to what extent Antarctica and Outer Space are un-owned spaces. Whether they are terra nullius—land owned by no one—or terra communis—land collectively owned by humanity—remains a fundamental tension in the international laws and treaties that produce them as legal geographies (Collis 2012). This article studies the legal geographies of these related spaces, highlighting the congruencies and the differences between them. In doing so, it explains not only the nature of terra nullius and terra communis today, but also analyses the ways in which these ‘non-territories’ comprise a notable component of contemporary geopolitics. Antarctica comprises seven huge, “frozen” state territorial claims, established and maintained by formal state practices of “effective occupation.” The geostationary orbit is partitioned into spatial segments, or arcs, assigned to states; the status of non-state actors in Outer Space remains the subject of substantial speculation and discussion. As minerals in the accessible areas of Earth become more scarce, and as technology makes mineral extraction and military use of uninhabitable spaces increasingly feasible, it is crucial that discussions of their futures be grounded in a strong understanding of their current legal geographies. This article contributes a critical perspective to that project, as well as offering insights into the contemporary nature of ‘territory’ itself.
The Development of Property Rights on Frontiers: Endowments, Norms, and Politics
The Journal of Economic History, 2012
How do property rights evolve when unoccupied areas attract economic use? Who are the first claimants on the frontier and how do they establish their property rights? When do governments provide de jure property rights? We present a conceptual framework that addresses these questions and apply it to the frontiers of Australia, the United States, and Brazil. Our framework stresses the crucial role of politics as frontiers develop, by identifying situations where the competition for land by those with de facto rights and those with de jure rights leads to violence or potential conflicts.
Reconfiguring Frontier Spaces: The territorialization of resource control
s u m m a r y The expansion of capitalism produces contests over the definition and control of resources. On a global scale, new patterns of resource exploration, extraction, and commodification create new territories. This takes place within a dynamic of frontiers and territorialization. Frontier dynamics dissolve existing social orders—property systems, political jurisdictions, rights, and social contracts—whereas territorial-ization is shorthand for all the dynamics that establish them and reorder space anew. Frontier moments offer new opportunities, and old social contracts give way to struggles over new ones. As new types of resource commodification emerge, institutional orders are sometimes undermined or erased, and sometimes reinterpreted, reinvented, and recycled. New property regimes, new forms of authority, and the attendant struggles for legitimacy over the ability to define proper uses and users follow frontier moments. The drawing of borders and the creation of orders around new resources profoundly rework patterns of authority and institutional architectures. We argue that the territorialization of resource control is a set of processes that precedes legitimacy and authority, fundamentally challenging and replacing existing patterns of spatial control, authority, and institutional orders. It is dynamics of this sort that the articles in this collection explore: the outcomes produced in the frontier space, the kinds of authority that emerge through control over space and the people in it, and the battles for legitimacy that this entails. This collection explores the emergence of frontier spaces, arguing that these are transitional, liminal spaces in which existing regimes of resource control are suspended, making way for new ones.
The Changing Concept of Sovereignty in Outer Space
Legal Bloc Journal (ISSN: 2395-0277) , 2015
Since World War I, the accepted principle has been that countries can direct flight over their regions or regional oceans. Apparently, nobody was genuinely worried about satellites and space vessels when the different traditions tending to over flight were drawn. In any case, the space soon gets to be noteworthy. One of the most punctual issues was exactly how far national sovereign power reaches out: when does airspace stop and space start. The issues surrounding sovereignty over outer space are likely to become ever more critical as globalisation, growing pressure on resources and the need for energy and national security become acute, and the resolution of special delimitation disputes seems likely to become an important question in the twenty-first century. This project begins shall constitute an examination of sovereignty and exploitation of resources on earth and in outer space. It provides a good overview of relevant international space law, focusing on provisions of the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Agreement and other treaties so as to answer the debatable question of sovereignty over outer space.
Sovereign Territory and the Domination over Nature.pdf
This paper shows how the legal-political technology of territorial sovereignty provides an organizing logic of modern political domination over both nature and the persons within an arbitrarily created geographic space. The paper suggests that the most fruitful way to critically analyze sovereignty and its hold over natural space it is not to judge it in light of moral principles of justice but to genealogically account for fundamental injustices which sovereignty reproduces. I argue that these injustices follow from sovereignty being organized around an exclusive property claim to natural space and a distinct political logic of the exploitation of nature for the sake of sovereign’s exclusive benefit and his or her ability to sustain the rule. It is this logic which has shaped modern sovereignty’s scope and its content and which has made natural resources within its reach inextricably connected to injustice and its most fundamental forms – violence, oppression, dispossession, exclusion, and distributive inequality. The paper also seeks to revitalize critical theory’s concern with the domination over nature while at the same time connecting it with an emerging strand of critical theory which sees law as an indispensable instrument of emancipation.
This essay examines the most recent justifications for a people's (or state's) exclusive right to resources as part of a territorial right. Divided into eight parts, the discussion covers contemporary philosophical discussion regarding: the conception of natural resources, the conception of resource rights, the general form of arguments supporting resource rights, arguments from self-determination, objections to arguments from self-determination, arguments from residence, arguments from improvement, and new directions for research in the future.