Many of the world’s intractable conflicts – and even wars – stem from territorial disagreements. These disputes are fundamentally about what land is ‘fair’, what communities have a right to self-determination, and where sovereignty lies. In this article, we explore how these disputes – which often last for decades and result in significant suffering – can be resolved, or at least reduced, without violence and war.
The first challenge in defining the term territorial dispute is understanding what it excludes. For example, focusing on territorial disputes with militarized dimensions risks excluding some cases that are not in fact active territorial claims (but may be latent). This is an important issue to consider from both a scholarly perspective and a policy-relevant one.
A second issue is the definition of when a territorial dispute is settled. Various definitions are used in the literature, and there is debate about whether these definitions capture the same phenomenon. For example, Paul Huth defines a territorial dispute as “any disagreement over the location of a country’s common or colonial borders” and “in particular, contestation of a country’s right even to exercise sovereignty over some or all of its homeland territory.”
Emilia Justyna Powell and Krista E Wiegand use this more narrow approach to define territorial disputes, and have shown that they are highly prevalent in the world. Their analysis is based on data from the International Crisis Behavior dataset, and it covers 3000 militarized disputes between 1919 and 2009. They find that territorial disputes account for 29.2% of these, and that they are more likely to be characterized as multilateral than bilateral.