Lunch Seminar
"‘This is Our Land’: The Rights of Strangers and the ‘Form of the People’ in Early Modern International Thought"
19 de maio, 12h30
Sala 311, Colégio Almada Negreiros

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 "‘This is Our Land’: The Rights of Strangers and the ‘Form of the People’ in Early Modern International Thought"

Sexta-feira, 19 de maio | 12h30 - 13h30    

Sala 311, Colégio Almada Negreiros, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, campus de Campolide   

Apresentação: Guilherme Marques Pedro, pós-doutorando em Teoria e História das Relações Internacionais, Departamento de Relações Internacionais (IRIO), Universidade de Groningen. 

Comentário: Ana Fouto, Professora Auxiliar na Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de Lisboa (FDUL) e Investigadora Principal no Instituto de Investigação Interdisciplinar da FDUL.

ABSTRACT

The task of identifying who constitutes ‘the people’ has for some time now been undisputedly hopeless. But while the study of the varying content of that chameleonic signifier gives us some perspective on the historical shifts in the make-up of a whole range of political communities, what seems lacking still in contemporary literature, ranging from political theory to the history of international law, is a systematic study of how the emergence of the idea of peoplehood co-existed with the ‘birth of territory’, to use Stuart Elden’s famous title. Nowhere in his book can we find the suggestion that the early modern discourse of peoplehood may have actually, albeit very gradually, legitimized the design and enforcement of territorial borders later on, and in such a way as to ensure almost exclusive access of ‘the people’ to land. In order to understand the priority of the people over outsiders in accessing land and resources, we must therefore ask where the assumption that a state’s territory ‘belongs to the people’ that grounds its authority, comes from. My historical and theoretical investigation offers some ground for arguing that ‘the people’ was and still is a legal fiction designed to foster the state’s territorial jurisdiction along with its right to exclude, and that letting go of ‘the people’ — conceived as the putative second order right-holder of the state’s territory and resources — may well be the only way to treat outsiders equally and bring justice to the global governance of international migration.