Territorial Sovereignty and Humankind's Common Heritage* Cécile Fabre (original) (raw)

Anna Stilz's latest book Territorial Sovereignty covers an impressively wide terrain, from the state's right to rule over a territory to the right to secede, from cultural neutrality to equitable access to natural resources, from collective self-determination to cooperation with international institutions, from coercive to noncoercive responses to the commission of injustice. In this paper, I examine Stilz's account and defense of territorial sovereignty in the light of the view that there are landmarks (monuments, geological structures, and landscapes) which are located in and subject to the jurisdiction of sovereign states, but which are deemed to be of outstanding value to humankind as a whole, irrespective of whatever economic value they might have. Put differently, I am interested in bringing Stilz's account to bear on the notion of humankind's common heritage. I provide a brief sketch and defense of that notion. I show that Stilz does not have the argumentative resources to make the state's right to rule over its territory conditional upon its common-heritage based decisions, but that she can nevertheless support the weaker claim that those decisions are subject to evaluation at the bar of justice.