The just acquisition principle has
been previously related to territorial sovereignty since it has been maintained
that amongst the objects to which this principle is meant to be capable of
applying are portions of the Earth’s surface, that is, areas of land.
And that is exactly the aim of these posts: to evaluate whether there is a peaceful way of allocating sovereignty over non-sovereign
areas of land or disputed territories.
Nevertheless, the principle of just acquisition is not the answer to
resolve these issues. Its main pitfall is that the information required to
apply this principle is not epistemically accessible in sovereignty
conflicts—e.g. how far back would the agents need to investigate so as to
determine who the first inhabitants of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands were? What
would happen in the case of extinct civilisations? What about cultures that
were in Ancient Times nomadic?
To have a better understanding of the
principle of just acquisition Nozick comes into play, offering his ‘entitlement
theory’. But, though his theory is a subtle revision of just acquisition
theory, examination of it will demonstrate that this principle is not workable
in sovereignty disputes. In Nozick’s entitlement theory just acquisition
becomes the first of three principles (this section is not concerned with the
other two):
“An individual A acquires
at time t a full property right in an object O which has not previously been
the property of any individual if and only if:
(i)
A
mixes his labour with o at time t; and
(ii) as a result of O becoming A’s private
property, no one else is made any worse off than he or she would have been, O
having being left unappropriated by anyone and had everyone in consequence been
free to use O without appropriating it.”
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), in particular Part
II, Chapter 7, Section I.
NOTE: based on Chapter 6, Núñez, Jorge Emilio. 2017.
Sovereignty Conflicts and International Law and Politics: A Distributive
Justice Issue. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.
Jorge Emilio Núñez
Twitter: @London1701
31st October 2018
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