Bones of Contention

Abstract

Contentious issues are important sources of militarized conflict. This article advances an issue-based approach to world politics, focusing on disagreements over territory, maritime zones, and cross-border rivers. We characterize militarized conflict and peaceful techniques as substitutable foreign policy tools that states can adopt to resolve disagreements over issues, and we present hypotheses to account for issue management based on issue salience and recent interaction over the same issue. Empirical analyses reveal that states are more likely to use both militarized conflict and peaceful methods when the issue at stake is more salient, both when the general issue type is considered more salient and when the specific issue under contention has greater within-issue salience. Recent issue management also plays an important role, as histories of both militarized conflict and failed peaceful settlements increase pressure to take further action to settle the issue.

Peaceful Management of International River Claims

“…This is also consistent with other recent research on the management of territorial and maritime issues as well as river claims (Hensel et al 2008), which finds that all three issue types --territorial, maritime, and river --are generally managed similarly and that more salient issues of each type are likely to see both more conflictual and more cooperative interactions. Future work would do well to investigate these commonalities, in order to explore the specific situations where states are most likely to choose cooperative rather than conflictual techniques to manage or settle their disagreements (over rivers or otherwise).…”

“…Finally, where a river claim has already begun, we measure the importance of that specific claim using the ICOW project's index of river claim salience (Hensel, Mitchell, and Sowers 2006;Hensel, et al 2008). This index attempts to measure the overall value of the river that is involved in the claim, based on six factors that are believed to make the river more valuable to one or both of the claimants: (1) river location in the state's homeland territory rather than in colonial or dependent territory, (2) navigational usage of the river, (3) level of population served by the river, (4) the presence of a fishing or other resource extraction industry on the river, (5) hydroelectric power generation along the river, and (6) irrigational usage of the river.…”

China’s Approach in Territorial Disputes Settlement

“…Related to the question of value as an explanatory factor is the type of territory under dispute. Quantitative studies show that territorial disputes are more likely to lead to militarised conflict and less likely to be settled peacefully than maritime or river disputes (Hensel et al, 2008). …”

Economics and Asia‐Pacific Region Territorial and Maritime Disputes: Understanding the Political Limits to Economic Solutions

“…There are five reasons why these cases merit attention. First, territorial and maritime disputes are highly contentious (Hensel, Mitchell, & Thyne, 2008), and it is thus necessary to analyze the APR's borderline controversies in order to understand its security prospects. Second, countries in the APR care intensely about their boundaries on land and in the sea, and consequently territorial and maritime issues continue to influence foreign policy dynamics in the region (BBC News, 2009; H. Li, 2009).…”