Militarized Management of Territorial Claims

Systematic research on militarized conflict over territory has focused on militarized consequences, such as conflict severity or recurrence, while research on the management of territorial issues or on conflict management more generally has emphasized peaceful attempts to manage or settle claims. This paper compares the relative effectiveness of militarized and peaceful techniques for managing territorial issues, as well as analyzing the extent to which the context of recent armed conflict affects the prospects for peaceful techniques. Preliminary results indicate that militarized techniques are much less likely than peaceful techniques to resolve territorial claims, while having several distinct impacts on the effectiveness of peaceful settlement attempts. Peaceful settlement attempts begun with a legacy of recent militarized conflict -particularly when this conflict produced fatalities -are less likely to reach agreements than comparable attempts in different contexts, but the agreements that are produced are more likely to be carried out by both parties and to end the claim. The paper concludes with suggestions about future directions for the study of both peaceful and militarized attempts to manage territorial issues. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the CEEISA and International Studies Association, Budapest, 27 June 2003. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Portland. The author wishes to thank Sara Mitchell for her feedback, while retaining all blame for any errors. ICOW project data, documentation, and revised versions of this and related papers are available online at . Militarized Management of Territorial Claims in the Americas, 1816-2001 The topic of territorial claims has increasingly received systematic empirical analysis in the past two decades. Recent studies have examined territorial and other issues in interstate wars (e.g., Holsti 1991), militarized disputes over territory (e.g., Hensel 1996; Senese 1996), and the management of territorial claims (Huth 1996; Hensel 2001). Other studies have examined conflict management patterns more generally, rather than focusing on attempts to manage a single issue (e.g., Wilkenfeld and Brecher 1984; Dixon 1996). This paper seeks to contribute to these emerging bodies of literature on territory and conflict management by integrating the study of militarized conflict and the peaceful management of territorial claims with a common theoretical framework. It then concludes by discussing potentially fruitful avenues for further research on territory/geography and conflict. Research on Territorial Issues Systematic research on territorial issues has taken several forms. One prominent approach has focused on militarized conflict over territory. Research in this strand began by identifying a set of militarized conflicts and attempting to determine the contentious issue(s) at stake in each one, on either a conflict-wide or individual-actor basis. For example, Holsti (1991) compiled a list of all wars since 1648 and then identified the issues involved for each participant in each war; territorial issues turned out to be the most common issue involved in these wars. Similar efforts have subsequently been made to study the issues involved in militarized disputes and in other lists of wars, although typically with less comprehensive categorizations of issues than the list of approximately thirty different issues studied by Holsti (see Hensel 2000). Beyond the descriptive value of compiling lists of the most frequent issues in wars or other armed conflicts, some research in this area has attempted to use this distinction between issues to account for variation in conflict behavior. For example, several studies since the mid-1990s have compared militarized disputes over territorial issues with those over other issues. These studies have generally found that territorial-issue disputes were much more likely to reach high levels of escalation and to be followed by recurrent conflict between the same adversaries (e.g., Hensel 1996, 2000; Senese 1996; Vasquez and Henehan 2001). A second approach to research on territory has gone beyond militarized conflict to the larger question of the political management of territory. A central belief in this approach is that militarized conflict is only one form of interaction over territorial issues, and that much can be learned by studying other forms of interaction as well. Systematic work in this area began with the collection of the Correlates of War (COW) project’s Territorial Change data set, which attempted to catalog every exchange of territory between states (as well as new states’ gaining of independence from existing states). This approach produced a number of journal articles and several books (e.g., Goertz and Diehl 1992; Kacowicz 1994), and produced a variety of interesting findings on (inter alia) conditions that increase the likelihood that a given territorial change will occur through the use