Charting A Course To Conflict: Territorial Issues and Interstate Conflict, 1816-1992

Abstract

Contentious issues have frequently been overlooked in the study of international relations and interstate conflict. This paper explores the influence of territory and territorial issues on processes of interstate conflict. I begin by reviewing existing approaches to the study of territory, and existing theoretical efforts to understand the role of territory. I then offer an empirical investigation of the effects of territory on conflict, using the Correlates of War Project's data on militarized interstate disputes. Conflict processes are found to differ noticeably when territorial issues are at stake between the adversaries. Disputes in which territorial issues are at stake tend to be much more escalatory than disputes over less salient issues, using several different indicators of dispute severity and escalation. Disputes over territorial issues are less likely to end in stalemated outcomes than disputes over other issues, and more likely to end in decisive outcomes. Furthermore, the same adversaries are more likely to become involved in recurrent conflict in the aftermath of disputes over territorial issues, and this future conflict is likely to recur sooner than after disputes over other issues. Territorial issues thus seem to be especially salient to state leaders, producing more escalatory confrontations and being difficult to resolve through militarized means without triggering recurrent conflict in the future. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for future research on conflict and on contentious issues, and by offering some implications for policy-makers.

Bones of Contention

“…Drawing from such arguments, research on the evolution of interstate rivalry (Diehl and Goertz 2000;Hensel et al / Comparing Territorial, Maritime, andRiver Issues 125 Hensel 1999, 2001) and repeated crises (Colaresi and Thompson 2002;Leng 1983) has found substantial evidence that states become increasingly likely to become involved in future militarized conflict as they accumulate a longer history of conflict. Hensel's (1999) evolutionary approach to rivalry suggests that past interactions between two states could lead them along either a more conflictual path toward rivalry or a more cooperative path toward better relations, depending on what the states do to each other and what outcome results. Most evolutionary research on rivalry has focused on militarized conflict as both the primary independent variable (the type of past behavior being studied) and the primary dependent variable (the type of future behavior being explained).…”

“…Indeed, Hensel (1999) explicitly calls for extending this approach to nonmilitarized interactions, and Hensel (2001) examines evolution in both militarized and nonmilitarized dimensions of territorial claims in the Americas. The present study goes even further.…”

“…Territory, for example, is often described as quite important to states for both tangible and intangible reasons (Hensel 1996;Hensel and Mitchell 2005;Vasquez 1993). Territorial claims often involve land that contains economic and/or strategic value, thus relating to the tangible values of wealth and physical security.…”

Civil War from a Transnational Perspective

“…Schultz (2010) argues that there are two ideal types of dyads with recurrent disputes, namely dyads with ongoing territorial disputes or claims, and dyads where repeated disputes pertain to issues over a domestic conflict and civil war. Although territorial disputes are an important source of interstate conflict and often escalate to war (Abramson and Carter forthcoming;Hensel 1996), territorial disputes are also found to be more amenable to settlement by agreement, and such settlements tend to be stable once established, since the states involved have few incentives to deviate from agreements once reached (Goertz et al 2016). By contrast, for recurrent disputes that emanate out of civil war we also see many agreements.…”

What drives interstate balancing? Estimations of domestic and systemic factors

“…More specifically, I have attempted to isolate those cases in which one state laid a formal claim to a part or all of another state's territory. This seems an appropriate choice for the following reasons: First, territorial claims are likely to be seen as threats independent of the characteristics of specific administrations or elites heading a country because they are usually rooted in long-standing national historical narratives and legacies instead of in more short-lived political programs (Murphy 2005; see also, Hensel [1996] on territorial conflicts as drivers of interstate rivalry). Second, they can be relatively clearly observed since such claims are usually openly stated as claimants attempt to bolster their legitimacy.…”