Original Ownership of the Globe and the Right of Relocation: A Theoretical Inquiry into the Validity of International Borders with Respect to People *

[*This is a work in progress. Please do not quote without the author’s permission.] John Locke is deemed to be one of the early modern political philosophers most amenable to the right of relocation. That said, his seminal The Second Treatise is generally interpreted as a ringing endorsement of the right of revolution rather than the right of relocation. His stance on the right of relocation has not yet received adequate analytical treatment, although there are some contemporary works that devote attention to this aspect of his political project.1 In this context, and in the light of the increasing importance of the ethical aspects of migration in the contemporary era, I expound a suitable, internally coherent Lockean theory of the right of relocation in this paper, based on a close scrutiny of Locke’s political writings, especially The Second Treatise, sticking to the basic Lockean spirit but reinventing and reinterpreting some of Locke’s ideas to tailor them to the post-agrarian scenario.2 What can be suitably regarded as the best Lockean position with regard to the right of relocation when one strips Locke’s worldview of its extraneous theistic overtones (i.e., when one takes revelation out of Locke’s normative system and bases his normative system primarily on the reason component) and then interprets it in a post-agrarian scenario in a logically consistent fashion