Territorial dispute concerns a state’s claim of legitimate jurisdiction over territory that it occupies or intends to control. This is an important and recurring issue in international politics, and is the source of some of the most militarized conflicts in the world. Although scholars have debated the merits of a strict legal definition, most settle for something close to Kocs’ (1995) characterization: “a territorial dispute is an issue that involves two or more states formally claiming legitimate jurisdiction over the same territory.” The number and severity of contested territorial disputes has varied widely across time and place (e.g., Allcock and colleagues, 2011).
Scholarly focuses on a variety of methods to explore the phenomenon of territorial conflict. Some work examines how states’ international political conditions, including domestic concerns and their perception of the relative strategic and economic value of a disputed territory, affect the likelihood that a territorial dispute will become militarized. Others focus on how states’ international legal systems can influence their behavior in a territorial dispute. The use of arbitration and adjudication mechanisms, such as the International Court of Justice and regional courts, has been shown to reduce the incidence of militarized conflict over territorial issues by providing domestic political cover for leaders that negotiating compromise does not offer.
In addition to exploring the characteristics of territorial conflict, scholarship aims to understand how these disputes move between latent and active phases. This has been a particular challenge for studies of recurrent conflict, given that territorial disputes are often subsumed in rivalry relationships over other issues.
