Annual Warrender Lecture - Territorial Justice: A Cosmopolitan Theory

We are very pleased to announce that this year's Warrender Lecture will be given by Professor Lea Ypi, and will be held on Tuesday, March 11th, 4.30-6pm in the Diamond, Lecture Theatre 7.

Please register to attend via this form. 

Professor Ypi is Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason, all published by Oxford University Press. Her philosophical memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Penguin) was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize, won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Free was named a book of the year in (among others) the Sunday Times, New Yorker, Financial Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Spectator, New Statesman, and Daily Mail. Prospect magazine named Professor Ypi one of 2022’s ‘World’s Top Ten Thinkers’.

In her Warrender Lecture, titled 'Territorial Justice: A Cosmopolitan Theory', Professor Ypi will discuss themes from her forthcoming book on territorial rights. Inspired by a Kantian theory of justice which emphasises the interdependence of domestic and cosmopolitan right, the book offers a new theory of territory which explains the provisional and conditional nature of states’ claim to territorial jurisdiction. While exploring the justification and rationale of such a claim, she also outlines its implications for historical injustice, the control of resources and the exercise of the right to exclude. The result is a novel theory of territorial justice that largely avoids the status-quo bias of existing theories.

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The Warrender Lecture is named in honour of Howard Warrender, who was Professor in Political Theory and Institutions in Sheffield from 1972 until his death in 1985. The inaugural Warrender Lecture was given by D. D. Raphael in 1986. Since then, guest lecturers have included Allen Buchanan, David Held, Cecile Fabre, Cecile Laborde, David Miller, Anne Phillips, and Quentin Skinner.