Although the nation-state has ceased to be the primary political unit used to organize human society, territory is still important. Possessing land entails physical space, and controlling land requires a physical presence that will be violent if it is not wanted or resisted (Clausewitz). State militaries are the primary means states use to control territorial spaces, which makes an interest in territorial disputes one of the most enduring concerns in international conflict scholarship.
Conflict scholars have long struggled with what exactly defines a territorial dispute, especially in the light of competing structural paradigms. Early work such as Holsti (1991) argued that territorial claims were central to conflict, and later scholars like Vasquez (1995) developed a condensed typology of wars coded by territorial concerns.
However, the definition of a territorial dispute is an incredibly complex question for two reasons. First, territorial disputes can rapidly move between active and latent stages, which makes determining their status in a given period difficult. Second, scholarly definitions of territorial disputes tend to exclude situations that may be important but not militarized, such as the multistate claims on Antarctica and the American claims on Machias Seal Island.
The result is that the research literature on territorial disputes remains remarkably fragmented, with different studies using a wide range of conceptual and operational definitions. Allcock et al. (2009) develop a relatively consistent set of criteria for territorial disputes, but they also exclude maritime boundary disputes and disputes over natural resources that are not tied to a particular territory. Other studies have focused on mediation-initiation, but this work has not taken into account the varying interests of third party mediators (e.g., major powers with trade ties).
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