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Contested Territory

Contested Territory

Rev. 29 June 2016

Sara Mitchell (2016) notes some salient points about historic and contemporary territorial disputes:

• The leading cause of war in history involves territorial disputes such as competition over Alsace-Lorraine, Kashmir, the Golan Heights, and the Beagle Channel
• Countries who share contiguous borders are more likely to fight wars with each other than non-contiguous states, especially if they have disagreements over specific pieces of territory (Tobler's First Law)
• Territory that is more valuable because of natural resources, religious sites, or historical homeland claims generates more violence.
• Wars also spread or diffuse across geographic boundaries
• Territorial disputes can be resolved successfully with peaceful conflict management tools such as arbitration and adjudication through international courts
• The successful settlement of border disputes promotes democratization and helps secure the stability of shared borders in the long run
• State borders have also become more difficult to violate in recent decades because of the emergence of a norm of territorial integrity
• The general decline in territorial conquest stems in part from increasing economic interdependence among countries in the world
• While disputes over traditional land borders have decreased over time, other types of territorial disputes have become more prevalent, such as competition over maritime resources in areas around islands or homeland areas including the Spratly Islands, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and the Bakassi Peninsula.

Types of Territorial Conflicts

The Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research (HIIK) is an independent and interdisciplinary registered association located at the Department of Political Science at the University of Heidelberg. Since 1991, the HIIK has collected, analyzed and distributed information on the emergence, course, and settlement of interstate and intrastate political conflicts.

The institute publishes an annual Conflict Barometer analyzing conflicts around the world and describing the recent history of the conflict, parties involved, the issues being disputed, and the intensity of any violence involved.

Conflict Issues are material or immaterial goods pursued by conflict actors via conflict measures. Due to the character of conflict measures, conflict issues attain relevance for the society as a whole - either for the coexistence within a given state or between states. Conflict issues are classified on the basis of ten items representing common goals of conflict actors:

• Interstate Conflicts
  • Territory: A change of the course of an international border
  • International Power: Change aspired in the power constellation in the international system or a regional system therein, especially by changing military capabilities or the political or economic influence of a state
• Internal Conflicts
  • National Power: A conflict over the power to govern a state
  • Secession: The aspired separation of a part of a territory of a state aiming to establish a new state or to merge with another state
  • Autonomy: Attaining or extending political self-rule of a population within a state or of a dependent territory without striving for independence
  • Subnational Predominance: The attainment of the de-facto control by a government, a non-state organization or a population over a territory or a population
  • Decolonization: The independence of a dependent territory
• Interstate and/or Internal
  • System/Ideology: Aspiration to change the ideological, religious, socioeconomic or judicial orientation of the political system or change the regime type itself
  • Resources: Possession of natural resources or raw materials, or the profits gained thereof, is pursued
  • Other: Conflicts that do not fit into the other categories

Other Sources of Conflict Data

Armed conflict is a matter of great interest and serious concern to people and states, and is therefore an area of significant research by a wide variety of organizationa.

The following are projects that systematically track, organize and disseminate data on armed conflicts around the world. All conflicts occur in specific places and almost all have some territorial dimension to them.

• Max Galka's A World of Disputed Territories map allows you to graphically browse territorial disputes involving countries around the world. The map and some of the more unusual disputes are discussed here...
• Correlates of War project (data from 1816 on)
• Armed Conflict Dataset UCDP/PRIO (data from 1946 on)
• Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)

Other Classifications of Territorial Conflicts

Gibler (2015) has categorized armed territorial conflicts into seven general groups:

• Disputed ownership of territory (borders, islands, colonies, maritime areas)
• General border issues (delimitation)
• Opportunity-based territorial conflict
• State system changes (new or disintegrating state)
• Border violations
• Rebellions

Dzurek (2005) created a classification of five factors that control the intensity of boundary disputes:

• Cultural Differences
• Recent Violence
• Historic Animocity
• Weak Government
• Third-Party Involvement

Jennings (1963) provides five modes by which sovereignty over territory can be acquired:

• Occupation: Establishing control over territory that was unadministered (terra nullius or res nullius) at the time of the claim
• Prescription: The maintenance of effective control for a sufficiently long period of time
• Accretion: Growth of territory through acts of nature
• Cession: Transfer by treaty
• Conquest: Transfer by force

Burghardt (1973) asserts that claims to territory can be placed in one or more of the following categories:

• Effective Control: The principal legal claim to territory is the uncontested administration of the land and its resident population. It is normally the strongest claim of all; in most of the world at any one time it is assumed and accepted
• Historical: These claims are based on priority or discovery - being there first in some sense
• Identity: These are based on the sense of a group of people belonging together. This definition includes not only nationalisms and their attendant irredentisms, but also all those ethnic, religious, and other cultural characteristics that bind people together
• Territorial Integrity: Claims based on the relative location of an area. Land is claimed because it is contiguous with terri- tory already controlled or because some physical connectivity is perceived to exist
• Economic: Claims which maintain that control of the coveted territory is necessary to the viability or development of the state. Such claims are usually specific and tend to deal with small bits of territory, such as port cities, transportation routes and mineral deposits
• Elitist: Claims that a particular minority has the right or duty to control certain territories. Such claims are currently out of fashion since they run counter to the democratic ideal. However, throughout history they have been the most widely used claims. Every group of conquerors, such as the Macedonians, the Normans, and the Mongols, has ruled as an elite. The principle of legitimacy, as it was understood before 1800, was based on the inherited right of certain families to control and allot territory. Landholdings and provinces could be com- bined by marriage or separated by inheritance. The monarchy and the nobility were felt to have the right (even the divine right) to rule the territory; the sovereign was sovereign.
• Ideological: Claims made on the basis of a belief or ideal. Historically, the most notable examples of these have been the many attempts to spread some kind of faith through extensive territories: the Crusades, the eastward drive of the Teutonic Knights, the Muslim outburst from Arabia, the advance of the Ottoman Turks, the dream of a pan-Slavic empire, or American attempts to spread democracy. All claims have some underlying ideology, although the ideology is often a mask that covers other motivations

Jackson and Morelli (2009) assert that there are two prerequisites for war between rational actors:

• The costs of war cannot be overwhelmingly high: There must be some plausible situations in the eyes of the decision makers such that the anticipated gains from a war in terms of resources, power, glory, territory, and so forth exceed the expected costs of conflict, including expected damages to property and life. At least one of the sides involved has to expect that the gains from the conflict will outweigh the costs incurred. Without this prerequisite there can be lasting peace.
• A Bargaining Failure: There is an inability to reach a mutually advantageous and enforceable agreement

They then go on to assert five causes for bargaining failure:

• Asymmetric information about the potential costs and benefits of war
• A lack of ability to enforce a bargaining agreement and/or a lack of the ability to credibly commit to abide by an agreement
• Indivisibilities of resources that might change hands in a war, so that not all potentially mutually beneficial bargaining agreements are feasible
• Agency problems, where the incentives of leaders differ from those of the populations that they represent
• Multilateral interactions where every potential agreement is blocked by some coalition of states or constituencies who can derail it

Countries That Don't Exist

The focus on interstate and intrastate conflicts presumes the existence of states as clear, fixed and universally accepted. There are territories that exist almost in a parallel world of independent "nations" with their own populations and governments.

David Robson's 2015 article for the BBC, The Countries That Don't Exist reviews Nick Middleton's An Atlas of Countries that Don’t Exist (Macmillan, 2015) in noting a handful of the 50 "countries" that Middleton profiles:

• The Republic of Lakotah (population 100,000): Located in the centre of the United States of America (just east of the Rocky Mountains), the republic is an attempt to reclaim the sacred Black Hills for the Lakota Sioux tribe
• Barotseland (population 3.5 million): An African kingdom with a population that has mounted a case to leave Zambia, and declared independence in 2012
• Ogoniland: An African kingdom that is attempting to disengage from Nigeria and also declared independence in 2012
• Republic of Murrawarri: Founded in 2013, after the indigenous tribe wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth II asking her to prove her legitimacy to govern their land. The Murrawarri gave her 30 days to reply – and with nothing but a deafening silence, they formally reasserted their claim to rule their ancient homeland
• Hutt River: A small Australian principality set up by a family of farmers hoping to escape the government’s strict grain quotas
• Forvik: a tiny Shetland Isle founded by an Englishman (from Kent) to promote transparent governance
• Sealand: An abandoned fort off the British coast occupied by a pirate broadcaster and declared an independent country in 1967
• Christiania: An enclave in the heart of Copenhagen formed by a group of squatters occupying a former army barracks in 1971
• Atlantium: A virtual country based in a remote rural province of Australia that welcomes anyone, anywhere to become a virtual citizen
• Elgaland-Vargaland: Another virtual country conceived by two Swedish artists and consisting of all land in between national borders and any bits of the sea outside another country’s territorial waters