Rights of Conquest, Discovery and Occupation, and the Freedom of the Seas: a Genealogy of Natural Resource Injustice
| Autor | Petra Gümplova |
| Cargo | Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany |
| Páginas | 1-36 |
Isonomía • Núm. 54 • 2021 • 10.5347/isonomia.v0i54.417 • [1]
Abstract: is paper analyzes the colonial origins of three international law principles –
the right of conquest, the right of discovery and occupation, and the freedom of the seas.
I argue that each of these rights was established as an international legal principle to faci-
litate the colonization of distant peoples, their territories and lands, an d for the purpose
of the accumulation of their natural resources. e paper discusses how these rights were
justied, what s et of exclusive powers and immunities the y conferred, and how they are
linked to three d istinct modern legal regim es of rights over natural space and its resour-
ces – territorial sovereignty, private property rights to foreign land, and global maritime
commons. W hile I expose each of these internatio nal law principl es’ morally arbitrary
origins reecting specic condit ions and aims of particular colonial projects, I also argue
that the regimes of rights over natural resources they institutionalized are convergent in
the se nse that the y enabled a quintessentially unjust appropriation and exploitation of
natural resources. e article also p oints to ways in which the logic an d the operation of
these regimes continue to s hape the unjust use of natural resources to this day.
Keywords: conquest, settlement , free sea, natural resources, injustice.
Resumen: Este artículo ana liza los orígenes coloniales de tres principios del derecho
internacional: el derecho de conquista, e l derecho de descubrimiento y ocupac ión, y la
libertad de los mares. Argumento que cada uno de estos derechos se establec ió como
principio juríd ico internacional para fac ilitar la colonizació n de pueblos lejanos , sus te-
rritorios y tierras, y con el n de acumular sus recursos naturales. El artículo analiza cómo
se justicaron estos derechos, qué conjunto de facultades e inmunidades exclusivas confe-
rían, y cómo están vinculados a tres regím enes jurídicos modernos distintos de derechos
sobre el espacio natural y sus recursos: la soberanía territorial, los derechos de propieda d
privada s obre tierras extranjeras y los bienes marítimos comunes mundiales. En tanto
expongo los orígenes moral mente arbitrarios de cada uno de estos principios de derecho
internacional, que reejan las condiciones y los objetivos especícos de determinados
Rights of Conquest, Discovery and Occupation, and the Freedom of
the Seas: a Genealogy of Natural Resource Injustice
Los derechos de conquista, descubrimiento y ocupación, y la libertad de los
mares: una genealogía de la injusticia sobre los recursos naturales
Petra Gümplová
Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies - University of Erfurt, Germany
petra.guemplova@uni-erfurt.de
Petra Gümplová
proyectos coloniales, también sosten go que los regímenes de derechos sobre los recursos
naturales que estos institucionalizaron son convergentes en el sentido de que permitieron
una apropiación y una explotación distint ivamente injustas de los recursos naturales. El
artículo también seña la las formas en que la lóg ica y el funcionamiento de estos reg íme-
nes siguen dando forma al uso injusto de l os recursos naturales hasta el día de hoy.
Palabras clave: conquista, asentamiento, mar libre, recursos naturales, injust icia.
I. Introduction
Natural resources have recently been discovered by political philosophy as one of the
key distributive goods the allocation of which matters prominently from the moral
perspective of justice and distributive equality. A common and uncritically accepted
assumption upon which most of the available conceptions rest is that natural resources
globe and therefore ought to be divided equally or redistributed according to some
other substantive principle of global distributive justice. Concerned preeminently with
the elaboration of normative theories on the basis of transcendent moral principles of
which occur in many parts of the world.1
I start with a premise that this is a serious omission, and that adding a critical
account of injustice to the debate about natural resources and justice is necessary.
Why? Injustice is a pervasive feature of the human use of natural resources in the
modern age. For much of modern global history starting in the Age of Discovery,
seeking, claiming, extracting or otherwise appropriating natural resources has been
inextricably linked to wars, territorial conquests, and forcible trading relations
and is fraught with violence, genocide, displacement, slavery, and oppressive and
imperial forms of political rule.2 Planting, harvesting, extracting, and trading with
natural resources has been connected with highly exploitative, discriminatory, and
environmentally harmful socio-economic systems based on racism and other forms of
inequality and exclusion (Wolf, 1982; Cronon, 1983; Beckert, 2015). Many of these
with their predecessors and they obviously raise problems other than global
distributive inequalities in resource holdings – they involve human exploitation,
authoritarianism, corruption, social and environmental harms, non-recognition of
indigenous rights, and other serious human rights violations (Klare, 2002, 2012;
Alao, 2007; Wenar, 2016; Gilbert, 2018).
DOI:10.5347/isonomia.v0i54.417
[2] Isonomía • Núm. 54 • 2021
Isonomía • Núm. 54 • 2021 • [3]
A systematic critical analysis of the variety of injustices connected to natural
resources or facilitated by them is long overdue, such that accounts for them in their
own right and in terms of their structure, mechanisms of operation, and forms of
begins to account for the main categories of injustice connected to natural resources and
their structure. It does so by looking into the history of the forceful taking of colonial
possession of natural resources by European empires and the imposition of distinct
regimes of rights over natural space and its resources which have since then become
of the Americas, the British settlement of North America, and the establishment of
setting of each of these colonial projects provided fertile ground for the forging of legal
doctrines which in turn facilitated the institutionalization of global regimes of unjust
appropriation of natural resources – territorial sovereignty, large-scale foreign land
acquisition and enclosures, and an open access regime of global maritime commons.3
of the age of dynamic expansion of European states overseas and their imposition of
systems of political domination, economic exploitation, and accumulation of natural
enterprises initiated the emergence of a set of rules which regulated political and
commercial relations between the Europeans and the rest of the world until the end of
the colonial era in the late 20th
emerged or were reinvented out of these colonial encounters – the right of conquest, the
right of discovery and occupation, and the freedom of the seas. As I seek to show, these
provided legal background for the imposition of regimes of control and accumulation
of resources. In this very process, they were also reinforced as international legal
doctrines which have since then provided important legal underpinnings for modern
conquest marked the right to impose sovereignty over a territory by military means,
thus framing the nature and scope of territorial sovereignty especially with regard to
property claims to natural resources within its boundaries. British settlement in North
America reinvented global rules for the settlement and occupation of foreign lands
and paved the way for the universalization of the Western system of private property
rights and their imposition. Dutch assertions to freely travel and trade using oceans
as a global common realm of navigation facilitated the establishment of free trade
Rights of Conquest, Discovery and Occupation, and the Freedom of the Seas:
a Geneanalogy of Natural Resource Injustice
Para continuar leyendo
Solicita tu prueba