Of elephants and living rooms

For at least half a century, since the major early works of Rawls, Feinberg, and others, political philosophy has been an absolutely vital intellectual enterprise. It has incomparably deepened our thinking on the meaning and value of democracy, equality, justice, and freedom. It has taught us to see the nature and importance of social institutions. It has forced us to confront and assess the morality of war and other forms of violence. More recently, it has thrown into question our assumptions about the boundaries of our moral communities and the quality of relationships both within and across them. But for all this, the enterprise of political philosophy has also nursed a number of shocking blind spots. Of those blind spots two are perhaps most dangerous.

The first is territory. The international relations theorist John Vasquez argues that territorial disputes are the most common cause of war, and that this explains “why neighbors fight” (Vasquez 1995). Just war theory has blossomed – or perhaps exploded is the better word – in the decades since Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars. But the territoriality of states and of the disputes that arise between them has been virtually absent from the work of political philosophers. Everyone knows that states are territorial, and most people agree that they are inevitably so.