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'On Borders' asks when are borders legitimate, and it offers a new theory to answer the question. The text challenges critical and normative theories that criticize or justify borders solely in terms of identity (who you are), and instead frames borders and border legitimacy from the perspective of place and presence (where you are). Instead of thinking of borders as the exclusionary limit of identity groups (a 'desert island model'), the work develops a theory of territorial jurisdictions grounded on place-specific relations, giving central roles to urban settings and the environment. Paulina Ochoa Espejo calls this the 'watershed model' of territorial rights and borders.

'On Borders' asks when are borders legitimate, and it offers a new theory to answer the question. The text challenges critical and normative theories that criticize or justify borders solely in terms of identity (who you are), and instead frames borders and border legitimacy from the perspective of place and presence (where you are). Instead of thinking of borders as the exclusionary limit of identity groups (a 'desert island model'), the work develops a theory of territorial jurisdictions grounded on place-specific relations, giving central roles to urban settings and the environment. Paulina Ochoa Espejo calls this the 'watershed model' of territorial rights and borders.

Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Time of the People -- 1. The Mob and the People in Mexico: A Historical Example of the Indeterminacy of Popular Unification -- 2. A Problem in Liberal Democratic Theory: The Indeterminacy of Popular Unification -- 3. Mechanical and Teleological Conceptions of the People -- 4. Dynamic Constitutionalism and Historical Time -- 5. The People Between Change and Stability -- 6. Creative Freedom and the People as Process -- 7. A Democratic People as Process -- Conclusion: Radical Realism -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Back Cover.

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years' time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

Who should have rights to territory? Dominant political theories hold that either individuals or state-based groups (states, nations, or state-based civic peoples) have foundational territorial rights. However, they cannot accommodate some Indigenous peoples' claims that the land should be subject neither to private ownership nor to sovereign state control. Given these claims, some scholars have recently revised these theories to mediate between state jurisdiction and private property. But those revisions have thus far neglected the views of Indigenous peoples who did not experience Anglo-American settler colonialism. This article therefore examines contemporary territorial rights theories in light of the experience of colonial Spanish America. Using sixteenth-century documents in which Indigenous communities conceptualized and asserted their rights to territory, historical evidence of political struggles between these communities and the colonial state, and interpretations of colonial legal thinkers from the seventeenth century (particularly Juan de Solórzano Pereira), I argue that, in addition to individuals and state-based groups, we should consider another subject of territorial rights:pueblos,or grounded communities.