 What is perhaps more surprising is that territory has been relatively neglected. Until recently, most debates in political philosophy have focused on the rights and duties of citizens toward the state, and vice versa, but relatively little was written about how to justify, or conceptualize, the territory of the state. This neglect was not confined to political philosophy: it was a feature of all three traditions that were influential in thinking about the state. In international law, the territorial dimension of the state was taken for granted. The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States defines states as territorial entities, which suggests that the first order of business is to explain, theorize and justify states and that the territory of the state can be simply assumed. This assumption was also made by political scientists, writing in both the comparative politics and international relations traditions. They offered explanatory and descriptive theories of the state but paid scant attention to the spatial element, largely assuming that the territory of the state is the product of history and past coercion which can be taken for granted as a basic feature of the state. One might have thought that normative political philosophers would be more interested in the question of how political authority can be wielded over territories and not just not over persons. However, political philosophers were also guilty of this blind spot, in part perhaps because of the extraordinary influence of Rawls in contemporary political philosophy. Rawls’s task in A Theory of Justice was to theorize the domestic justice of the basic structure of the state, and he therefore assumed, arguendo, that “political society is closed” (Rawls 1971: 4), by which he meant that we should conceive of it in the first instance as a self-sufficient entity that we happen to be in and cannot leave. He then tackled the question of the legitimacy of the state vis-à-vis the international order at a later stage of the analysis (Rawls 1999). The closed society assumption obscured many important issues from view, and has meant that political philosophers who adopt this methodological strategy have nothing to say in a range of cases that are very important for resolving questions of importance to inter-state peace and stability, as discussed above.