Davide Pala

Pet-keeping is one of the most widespread human-animal relationships in the world. Despite its prevalence, this practice frequently results in animal welfare violations, including neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Pet-keepers often fail to adequately understand how to care for and interact with their pet. This article defends a novel proposal to regulate pet-keeping: a scheme of state licensing. On this proposal, prospective pet-keepers would be required to obtain a license by demonstrating competence in caring for a domesticated animal before acquiring one. The article makes two significant contributions. First, it provides a robust theoretical defense of pet-keeping licenses. Second, it defends the feasibility of licensing, details the requirements it would impose, and suggests guidelines for plausible implementation. By extending regulation into the private sphere and setting enforceable standards for care, licensing can significantly reduce preventable harms to domesticated animals and better protect their interests.

Nowadays, many new agents, structures and dynamics make human rights insecure – think of TNCs or climate change. Yet states as they currently are seem unable to tackle these threats effectively. So what should an appropriate human-rights regime, that is, one that protects them securely and legitimately, look like, today? This article argues that republicanism provides the regime we need: a constitutional demoi-cracy. This new, mixed human-rights regime is a demoicracy for, even if states remain the primary locus where human rights are realised, they bind themselves to a union that governs together the new agents, structures and dynamics that threaten them, without their demoi merging into one global demos. It is constitutional, for this governing together gives rise to a thin but binding supranational apparatus, whose point is, similar to domestic constitutions, to constrain state power over human rights and at the same time to empower states to protect them.

What is owed to individuals who find themselves in a stateless condition? This paper ad-dresses this question by providing a novel republican account of the human right to legal citizenship. I argue that such individuals are owed citizenship, and that this duty corre-sponding to their human right to legal citizenship falls primarily on the entire international community, and only derivatively on single states. I then show that those owed citizen-ship as a matter of human rights are not only the formally stateless, but also, surprisingly, refugees, some displaced people and, arguably, some long-term migrants, too. This view improves the literature on human rights by showing that the standard view of states as primary duty-bearers, and international institutions as secondary duty-bearers only, needs improvement, for some duties correlated with human rights are primarily international. It also advances the debate in the political theory of migration on the duty to naturalize the formally and de facto stateless by clarifying this duty’s nature, grounds, scope, interna-tional dimension and implications.

What is the relation between non-domination and rights in the sense of claim-rights? This article argues that this relation is a tight one: rights turn out to be a necessary constituent of non-domination, or they are necessary, in a non-causal sense, for non-domination to come into existence and have its distinctive normative character. In particular, rights are necessary to constitute the following features of non-domination: the authority that non-domination signifies and the respect it demands; the kind of accountability that the non-arbitrariness condition of non-domination demands; and the robustness of non-domination. The article then suggests that rights, even if necessary for non-domination, are not also sufficient. It concludes by illustrating how the protection of rights often supports, rather than contradicts, other republican aims.

Nowadays, many new agents, structures and dynamics make human rights insecure – think of TNCs or climate change. Yet states as they currently are seem unable to tackle these threats effectively. So what should an appropriate human-rights regime, that is, one that protects them securely and legitimately, look like, today? This article argues that republicanism provides the regime we need: a constitutional demoi-cracy. This new, mixed human-rights regime is a demoicracy for, even if states remain the primary locus where human rights are realised, they bind themselves to a union that governs together the new agents, structures and dynamics that threaten them, without their demoi merging into one global demos. It is constitutional, for this governing together gives rise to a thin but binding supranational apparatus, whose point is, similar to domestic constitutions, to constrain state power over human rights and at the same time to empower states to protect them.