Avery Kolers

In The Shifting Border, Ayelet Shachar observes that the ‘beast’ of state migration policy has broken out of its cage and shifted both outward – to intercept migrants before they can ‘touch base’ and thereby gain rights – and inward, to restrict and subvert the rights of migrants and others in Exclusionary Zones within state territory. Shachar wants to ‘tame’ the beast by obligating states and their agents to uphold basic rights wherever they act. The current article first questions whether this ‘beast’ is necessarily monstrous, or whether it is not an admittedly excessive response to understandable challenges that arise due to the passivity of territorial states in the face of external forces. The article then suggests that the better response to this passivity is for states to embrace their legitimating function of trusteeship for the people of the world as a whole.

The Grasshopper’s game-playing Utopia collapses because, ideal though it might seem to some, ultimately most of us want more out of life than game-play. Building on both The Grasshopper and the published sequels in which Bernard Suits attempts to vindicate his Utopia, the current paper reconstructs Suits’s Utopia in a new way. I start from deeper reflection on Suits’s example of John Striver, a Utopian citizen who wants to work but whose profound boredom occasions Utopia’s collapse. Although the Grasshopper returns to Striver repeatedly and urges his interlocutors to bear him in mind, the case is underdeveloped and its implications undertheorized, both by Suits and his numerous commentators and critics. The Striver example reveals a picture of Utopian games as complex, dynamic, mutually responsive, and cooperative; such games are not only better for game-loving ‘Grasshoppers’ but make room in Utopia for work-loving ‘Ants’. This mutuality is the key to Utopia’s sustainability. The paper thus offers a new critique and reinterpretation of the central text in contemporary philosophy of sport and explicates the goods inherent in the ludic ideal.

Margaret Kohn has argued that fin-de-siècle French Solidarists such as Alfred Fouillée developed a “third way” between capitalism and socialism which still provides a powerful justification for “welfare state” institutions and public-goods provision. But how does Solidarism respond to the demands for environmental justice, and against environmental racism, which have emerged in the past 50 years, mostly in Women of Color-led social movements. Distinguishing three elements of environmental justice, and also pinpointing the logic of expendability at the core of environmental racism, the current article shows that Solidarism has more resources than liberal egalitarianism to challenge environmental injustice, but that, in the white supremacist state, environmental racism in particular poses an especially difficult challenge. After discussing the Solidarists’ divergent responses to feminism and Social Darwinism, the paper shows that, provided Solidarists are also in solidarity with social movements of the oppressed, their doctrine can aid the struggle for equal status.

Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-led Social Movements makes a significant contribution to contemporary capability theories by challenging their individualism. Mainline versions of the Capabilities Approach (CA), including those developed by Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Ingrid Robeyns, insist on a methodological and normative individualism. And with good reason: communitarianism most often reinscribes patriarchal power, especially within the family. Deveaux, however, argues that this individualism yields a depoliticized account of poverty as capability deprivation, thereby downplaying or even denying the agency of the poor. But poor-led social movements politicize poverty, understanding it as a social and political relation between individuals and institutions. These movements build collective political capabilities: capabilities that can be exercised only by groups or that promote collective goods. The current paper explicates, extends, and defends this powerful challenge to mainline capability theories.

Currently available political theories all fail to explain the nature or justification of territorial claims. My dissertation fills these gaps. In chapter one I distinguish between property and territory, explaining the inapplicability of property theories to territorial claims. Chapter two raises a challenge to egalitarian and cosmopolitan theories of global justice. The central claim of the chapter is that local democracy is an essential part of global justice, but that cosmopolitan theories cannot give due weight to local democracy. In addition, cosmopolitan theories are not entitled to the conception of equality or distributive justice to which they appeal; their failure in this respect is due to their failure to consider the distribution of land, which scuttles comparability and, with it cosmopolitan distribution principles. In contrast, there is good reason to think that a turn toward effective localized governance would promote democracy and the quality of life of all people. ;Chapters three, four, and five constitute the core of the dissertation. Chapter three isolates the particular sort of claim I hope to elucidate: prima facie primary rights to territory. Chapter three also defines what I call the "problem of relevance": the problem of finding political principles that could even speak to the issue of connecting peoples to places. Such principles are not forthcoming from mainstream political philosophy. Chapter four solves this problem with a geographically influenced conception of cultures. Chapter five defends the value of cultures so conceived, by arguing that stable cultural membership is an important component of individual freedom, and so merits protection and promotion through political and economic institutions. Finally, chapter six aims to situate the theory of prima facie primary rights to territory within the context of an "internationalist" theory of global justice. Such a theory takes from cosmopolitan theories a sophistication about global institutions and their effects on distributive schemes and power relations. But the theory also takes from culture-based theories an appreciation for the value of communal life and local, grassroots control of the institutions under which we live