“Pravova derzhava”. Issue 36 (2025), pages 239–250.

DOI: 10.33663/0869-2491-2025-36-239-250

Ivanova Anastasia
The Concept of Territorial Rights in Modern Western Literature: Historical and Legal Focus

Relevance. The author analyses the history of formation and essence of the concept of territorial rights in modern Western historiography with a view to assessing the potential prospects for its further application in the course of research of territoriality issues in historical and legal processes and historical and legal reality of Ukraine during different historical epochs and periods.
Literature review on the topic of the study. The author examines the works of wellknown modern Western theorists of territorial rights, in particular, Professors A. J. Simmons, David Miller, Anna Stilz, Lea Ypi, Bas Van der Vossen and others.
Objective. To research the history of formation and analyze the essence of the concept of territorial rights in Western historiography with a view to its expediency in historical and legal studies of the problems of Ukraine’s territoriality.
Problem statement. There are certain differences in understanding the content of territorial rights, considering attitudes to the following issues: correlation of territorial rights and the principle of territoriality of the state, as well as the question of who is the primary holder of territorial rights and, accordingly, the subject of their realization — the people who inhabit this land, or the state that rules on their behalf, acting as a representative of the people and acting on their behalf in the realization of territorial rights?
Presentation of the main material. The answers to these questions, in fact, largely determine the commitment to one of the following theories. The first group of theories are the acquisition theories, also known as Lockean theories, based on the idea that states acquire territorial rights through individual acts of private property submission by their subjects. The second group are statist theories, the main idea of which is that the state is the main subject of territorial rights, which is justified by its legitimate role in ensuring order, security and justice. The third group contains national and group theories of territorial rights, which are based on the strong belief that territorial rights belong to peoples, nations or cultural groups that have a historical connection and identity associated with a particular territory. The fourth group is performed by the justice-based (Kantian) theories mainly, which have their roots in Kantian philosophy and believe that territorial rights are necessary for the realization of justice and protection of individual rights within the legal framework, focusing on justice, legitimacy and moral necessity of state power over the territory. And the last, fifth group includes the permissive and hybrid theories, which combine elements of the above theories, focusing on the admissibility of territorial claims under certain conditions.
Conclusions. The author considers the concept of territorial rights to be promising for researching the problems of territoriality in the historical and legal reality of Ukraine in different historical epochs and periods. The author is also convinced that in the context of historical and legal research of legal problems of Ukrainian territoriality, different approaches may correspond to different historical periods, respectively, together with different subjects, content and grounds for the legitimacy of the acquisition of territorial rights.

Key words: territorial rights, legitimacy, state, people, territorial sovereignty

References

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