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Of all the issues in international relations, disputes over territory are the most salient and most likely to lead to armed conflict. Understanding their endurance is of paramount importance. Although many states have settled their disagreements over territory, seventy-one disputes involving nearly 40 percent of all sovereign states remain unresolved. In this study, Krista E. Wiegand examines why some states are willing and able to settle territorial disputes while others are not. She argues that states may purposely maintain disputes over territory in order to use them as bargaining leverage in negotiations over other important unresolved issues. This dual strategy of issue linkage and coercive diplomacy allows the chal­lenger state to benefit from its territorial claim. Under such conditions, it has strong incentive to pursue diplomatic and militarized threats and very little incentive to settle the dispute over territory. Wiegand tests her theory in four case studies, three representing the major types of territorial disputes: uninhabited islands and territorial waters, as seen in tensions between China and Japan over the Senkaku and Diaoyu Islands; inhabited tracts of territory, such as the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla affecting Morocco and Spain; and border areas, like the Shebaa Farms dispute between Lebanon and Israel. A fourth case study of a dispute between China and Russia represents a combination of all three types; settled in 2008, it serves as a negative example. All these disputes involve areas that have key strategic and economic importance both region­ally and globally.

Past studies conclude that a territorial integrity norm caused territorial conquest to decline sharply after 1945, virtually subsiding after 1975. However, using new and more comprehensive data on territorial conquest attempts, this study presents a revised history of conquest after 1945. Unlike attempts to conquer entire states, attempts to conquer parts of states remained far more common than previously recognized. More than conquest declined in frequency, its relationship with war evolved. Challengers attempting conquest before 1945 often initiated a war, then sought to occupy large territories. Today, challengers more often seize small regions, then attempt to avoid war. Adopting this strategy, the fait accompli, challengers increasingly came to target territories with characteristics that reduce the risk of provoking war—such as a low population and the absence of a defending military garrison—but challengers nonetheless take a calculated gamble. In part because seizures of smaller territories with such characteristics have not declined, the operative constraint appears to be against war-prone aggression, not territorial revision. The evolution of conquest is a symptom of war's decline, not its cause. Most of the evidence that the territorial integrity norm suppressed conquest or war withers under investigation with new data. Attempts to get away with seizing small pieces of territory are likely to be a defining element of the twenty-first-century international security landscape.

The question of what causes war has concerned statesmen since the time of Thucydides.The Steps to Warutilizes new data on militarized interstate disputes from 1816 to 2001 to identify the factors that increase the probability that a crisis will escalate to war. In this book, Paul Senese and John Vasquez test one of the major behavioral explanations of war--the steps to war--by identifying the various factors that put two states at risk for war. Focusing on the era of classic international politics from 1816 to 1945, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War period, they look at the roles of territorial disputes, alliances, rivalry, and arms races and show how the likelihood of war increases significantly as these risk factors are combined. Senese and Vasquez argue that war is more likely in the presence of these factors because they increase threat perception and put both sides into a security dilemma. The Steps to Warcalls into question certain prevailing realist beliefs, like peace through strength, demonstrating how threatening to use force and engaging in power politics is more likely to lead to war than to peace.

Territorial debates complicate the politics of the affected regions, as parties decide whether to compete on a territorial dimension alongside other longstanding important issues. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce regarding how much voters politically weigh territorial issues against others. We theorize that in contexts when such issues are salient, they have a greater weight relative to others due to their identity-oriented nature. We present evidence from conjoint experiments from three European regions with active territorial debates: Catalonia, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. We find that territorial preferences matter more than others for candidate choice, as the reward (punishment) of congruent (incongruent) candidates is greater, and individuals are less willing to trade off on this issue. Our results have comparative implications for political competition in multidimensional spaces.

Territorial notions of place and region are being challenged by the relational viewpoint. Yet relational thinking often neglects to address questions of territory and territorial politics. This progress report examines some commonalities and differences between relational and territorial approaches to regions and regionalism. It considers the treatment of the state and territorial politics in the various literatures developing around the New Regionalism. The received distinction drawn between territorial and relational approaches could be rendered obsolete if critical attention were to be paid to matters of territory and territorial politics.

Territorial debates complicate the politics of the affected regions, as parties decide whether to compete on a territorial dimension alongside other longstanding important issues. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce regarding how much voters politically weigh territorial issues against others. We theorize that in contexts when such issues are salient, they have a greater weight relative to others due to their identity-oriented nature. We present evidence from conjoint experiments from three European regions with active territorial debates: Catalonia, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. We find that territorial preferences matter more than others for candidate choice, as the reward (punishment) of congruent (incongruent) candidates is greater, and individuals are less willing to trade off on this issue. Our results have comparative implications for political competition in multidimensional spaces.

This paper focuses on how domestic legal systems influence states' choices of peaceful dispute resolution methods. In order to increase familiarity with rules of peaceful resolution of disputes, states use their domestic legal systems to provide them with clues about the most trustworthy ways to settle disputes. States tend to choose methods of dispute resolution that are similar to those embedded in their domestic legal systems. Empirical analyses support the conjecture of a linkage between domestic law and interstate conflict management methods, showing that civil law dyads prefer more legalized dispute resolution methods compared to common law dyads. Islamic law dyads are most likely to use nonbinding third party methods, while common law dyads tend to resolve their territorial disputes through bilateral negotiations.

Over 100 suspected Islamic State prisoners have escaped in north-east Syria. The breakout follows a government offensive that has driven Kurdish forces from swathes of territory the Kurds once controlled. Gareth Browne, our Middle East correspondent, reports from the ground.

Secession is an attempt to resolve a domestically based territorial dispute by dividing a country's homeland territory into new, secessionist (e.g., Eritrea) and rump (e.g., Ethiopia) states. Yet, the secession may not have resolved the original dispute to the states' satisfaction. In the aftermath of a secession, the leader of the rump state is motivated to use force by the benefits of retaking (some of) the land lost to the secessionist state, while the secessionist state's leader is motivated by the benefits of acquiring even more land. The peaceful versus violent secession process further affects whether these desires escalate into the use of force. The results-based on the examination of the consequences of all twentieth-century secessions-reveal that ethnically based territorial disputes play a much greater role in conflict onset than do their economically or strategically based counterparts and that peaceful secessions lead to peaceful relations.

The Russian military interventions in Ukraine, which have led to the annexation of the Crimean peninsula and to the entrenchment of separatist enclaves in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, directly challenge the post-Cold War European state system. Russia has consistently denied any wrongdoing or illegal military involvement and has presented its policies as a reaction to the repression of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. This article argues that it is important to examine and contest unfounded Russian legal and political claims used by Moscow to justify its interventions. The article proceeds to assess in detail three different explanations of the Russian operations in Ukraine: geopolitical competition and structural power (including the strategic benefits of seizing Crimea); identity and ideational factors; and the search for domestic political consolidation in Russia. These have all played a role, although the role of identity appears the least convincing in explaining the timing and scope of Russian encroachments on Ukrainian territorial integrity and the disruption of Ukrainian statehood.