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Conference Announcement "Territory, Diversity and Citizenship" Interdisciplinary Workshop Ethnicity and Democratic Governance Project Donald Gordon Centre, Queen’s University Kingston, ON (Canada) 4-5 June 2010 __________________________________________________ Workshop co-coordinators: Margaret Moore, Queen's University Avigail Eisenberg, University of Victoria Territory, in the sense of political jurisdiction and homeland, and land in the broad sense of property (access and tenure both individual and collective) is at the centre of many of the most important contemporary issues facing the world today - war, poverty, economic development, climate change, immigration, human rights, secession, and border disputes. Control over territory is highly fateful for the prospects of both individuals and groups, through its effects on citizenship, identity, opportunities, rights, obligations, political power, and control of resources. Yet, despite the fact that issues of land, property and territory are ubiquitous in generating political conflict today, and widely studied by anthropologists, historians and political scientists, these issues remain normatively under-theorized. At the philosophical level, few political theorists tackle questions having to do with who has a right to territory or land (e.g. is it the nation? individuals? the whole world?); what considerations limit such rights; and how conflicting claims to territory ought to be normatively evaluated. This workshop aims to bring normative theorists and empirical social scientists together to address some of the central normative and practical dimensions of conflict that involve disputes about territory. Practically, the workshop is interested in issues from corrective justice in cases where people settle on land previously held by another group (e.g. in Israel-Palestine, Cyprus, South Africa, India), to cases of secession, boundary disputes, demands for autonomy, assertion of exclusive citizenship rights for autochthons (sons of the soil), and aboriginal land claims in former colonies of settlement, as well as to changing forms of land tenure and property rights both rural and urban. We are interested in papers that focus on how the politics of ethnic/cultural/religious identities play a role in many of the claims made for land. We are also interested in examining the kinds of moral claims that communities involved in such disputes can make for entitlement to land and the justifiability of these claims. We aim to be open to different understanding of the ways in which concepts of moral power, land rights, distributive justice, citizenship and belonging can alter with changing historical and cultural contexts. We invite contributions that address the following sorts of questions: 1. What moral powers are implicit in claims to land (in the sense of property) and in claims to territory and what is the relationship between property and territory? 2. According to what criteria (if any) is it morally justified to accord some groups (like nations or indigenous ethnic communities) territorial rights and deny these rights to others (like immigrants)? 3. To what degree can the moral justification for a territorial rights rest on matters related to criteria of identity/culture/ethnicity? 4. How do norms of international law and international development practice shape or affect more local norms and policies related to the tenure and distribution of land and the relations between ethnic communities? 5. How do we understand normative concepts such as ‘moral powers’ (eg. liberties to extract resources, to change land tenure practices and many other moral powers), ‘citizenship rights’, ‘distributive justice’ ‘moral economy’ and possibly others in relation to territory or land? How does this change in relation to different cultural contexts, including non-Western societies and Aboriginal communities? Are there alternative ways of framing land-related conflicts? EDG team members and students interested in this workshop should contact Jennifer Clark ([email protected]) and copy Margaret Moore ([email protected]) and Avigail Eisenberg ([email protected]). Workshop website: http://www.queensu.ca/edg/CFP_territory.pdf __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
