In the face of climate change and the ongoing industrialization of agriculture, various groups worldwide, such as small-scale farmers and the inhabitants of vulnerable island states, face the reality of land loss and draw on the powerful language of rights, in order to regain cultural, economic, and political autonomy. In this contribution we discuss this ‘geography of emerging rights’ and seek to understand how these groups reclaim land and how they establish new relationships amongst space, nature, politics, and law, in other words, how they aim to reclaim the ‘nomos’. Conceptually, we draw on agonistic political theory that allows us to grasp the inherent contradictions in the existing ‘topology’ of rights and to empirically look at the political energies that they might reveal in different contexts of the global south. We conclude by discussing the relations between loss of land and sovereignty, environmental (in-)justice and the emergence of new rights.