No right to unilaterally claim your territory: on the consistency of Kantian statism

The paper examines the consistency of recent Kantian justifications of state authority through reflection on the normative implications of states’ territorial nature. I claim that their conceptual structure leaves these accounts unable to close the justificatory gap that emerges at the transition from legitimate authority simpliciter, to legitimate state authority. None of the strategies Kantian statists have come up with in order to solve this problem – based on the proximity, occupancy, and permissive principles – provides the needed grounds on which to carve up the earth’s surface into jurisdictional domains. Yet, I conclude that this does not require Kantians to cede statist grounds altogether but to take a distinctly ‘global perspective’ on states.