Land, Territory, and Justice (MANCEPT Workshop 2026)

There is now a rich debate within and across diverse traditions of political and moral thought about the meaning, use, and desirability of the concepts of land and territory, and their relation to justice.

For example, the past fifteen years have been marked by the dedicated theorizing about territorial rights in contemporary Anglo-American moral and political philosophy (see for example: Miller, 2012; Moore, 2014, 2015, 2019; Nine, 2012; Ochoa-Espejo, 2020; Simmons, 2016; Stilz, 2019). While the first wave focused on core conceptual questions about the nature and scope of various territorial rights (including jurisdiction, self-determination, resource control, and immigration), the kinds of agents who hold these rights, and the normative justifications for them, this literature has now self-reflexively entered a “second wave” characterised by a deeper concern for questions of global inequality, decolonization, overlapping projects of self-determination, and the environmental crisis (Moore & Ugalde, 2025). For example: What is the extent of morally mandatory restitution in cases of territorial wrongdoing, including settler colonialism (Luoma, 2023; Luoma and Moore, 2024; Moore, 2019; Stilz, 2024; Riebold, 2022, 2023)? How may multiple peoples, with distinct normative and ontological systems, overlap in the same place without retrenching relationships of structural injustice and inter-group domination (Jourdeuil 2024, 2025a, 2025b; Luoma, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)? What forms of governance are required in ecologically integrated regions spanning borders (Nine, 2022)? How are territorial rights contingent on respect for biodiversity and ecological integrity (Moore, 2023; Kwan, 2025)? How can the benefits and burdens of natural resources, energy transition, and climate change mitigation/adaptation be fairly distributed between groups (Armstrong, 2017; De Biaso 2024a, 2024b; Li, 2022; Moore, 2019)?

Concurrently, Indigenous scholars, environmental philosophers, and eco-phenomenologists interrogate the core normative, ontological, and epistemological assumptions of these discourses. Indigenous theorists challenge the hegemony of rights-based territorial frameworks, contending that the natural world is not a stockpile of “resources” to be distributed and controlled according to a theory of justice, but is better conceived of as a kinship network populated by beings deserving of intrinsic concern and respect with whom we must live harmoniously (e.g., Allard-Tremblay 2023, 2025; Burkhart, 2019; Mills 2017, 2018, 2019; Simpson 2011, 2017; Temin 2023). Eco-phenomenologists challenge conceptions of land as a neutral background container against which we exercise our agency, demonstrating how land and place structure our lived experience and subjectivity, our ethical encounter with the alterity of the other-than-human, and the possibilities for political agency (Casey, 1993, 2018; Ingold, 2010; Malpas, 1998; Rose, 2005; Seamon, 2018; Smith, 2001, 2011; Toadvine, 2019).

Beyond political theory, land and territory are at the heart of intensifying international political conflicts, including attempted territorial annexations, rising majority and minority nationalism, struggles against (neo-)colonialism, and the global climate crisis. Consequently, this workshop welcomes submissions that investigate conceptual, normative, and applied questions at the intersection of land, territory, and justice, from diverse methodological perspectives including, but not limited to analytical moral and political philosophy, environmental philosophy and eco-phenomenology, Indigenous political thought, critical theory, and comparative dialogue.