Anna Stilz

Anna Stilz is Kernan Robson Professor of Political Science at UC-Berkeley. She is the author of Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, 2009), which dealt with questions about the moral importance of political citizenship and state authority. Her second book, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford, 2019), investigates whether there is a good ethical justification for organizing our world as a system of sovereign territorial states, and explores the limits to a state’s justified power over its territorial boundaries.

Stilz has research interests in the history of political thought (especially Rousseau, Kant, and post-Kantian political thought); nationalism; political obligation, authority, and state legitimacy; rights to self-determination, sovereignty, land, and territory; colonialism, anticolonialism, and decolonization; theories of collective agency; migration; and climate justice.

Her most recently published papers focus on the ethics of labor migration, on whether democratic citizens are partly culpable for their states’ wrongful acts, and on climate displacement and territorial justice. She is working on a new book project on the challenges that climate change poses to the territorial states-system, including climate displacement and the large-scale changes in land use and global governance that may be necessary to adapt to a warming climate. 

Stilz is a Co-Editor for Social and Political Philosophy of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Vice-President of the American Society for Legal and Political Philosophy (NOMOS).  Until May 2024, she was Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy and Public Affairs.  As of September 2024, she is the founding Editor of Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs.  She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University (2005) and a B.A. in French Literature and Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia (1999).