Anna Jurkevics, Contested Territory: A Theory of Land and Democracy beyond Sovereign Bounds – Oxford University Press, April 2025

Contested Territory presents a critical, non-sovereign theory of territorial rights capable of responding to border-defying global crises such as land dispossession, mass migration, and environmental depredation. Statist theorists have attempted to mitigate these crises within the framework of territorial sovereignty, but have not grasped how this crumbling system causes the problems they seek to solve. Others, pitting cosmopolitanism against sovereignty, have turned away from territoriality, thus ignoring the geographical dimensions of freedom. The need for a radical shift in theorizing territory is urgent. This book embarks on that shift and argues, against the mainstream view, that it is possible to theorize democracy within a framework of territorial non-sovereignty. In an effort to loosen the grip of sovereignty and broaden our territorial imagination, Contested Territoryresuscitates a long-suppressed tradition in the history of political thought: the tradition of theorizing contested territory. The theorists of contested territory—anarchists, exiles, federationists, cosmopolitans, indigenous theorists, and so on—do not view the absence of sovereignty over land as a problem, and instead find democratic potential in overlapping rule. Building on such alternatives, this book charts normative foundations for a cosmopolitan, democratic theory of territory and land politics. Through a critical engagement with the thought of Hannah Arendt, it grounds democratic land governance in the land-based, non-sovereign practices of world-building. Contested Territory concludes that is both possible and desirable to decouple democracy and territorial sovereignty, and that by doing so we can better respond to the border-defying crises of our age.