How Human Boundaries Become State Borders: Radical Flanks and Territorial Control in the Modern Era (original) (raw)

2018, Comparative politics

Violence and territorial control have always gone hand in hand. States are defined by their monopoly on the legitimate use of force internally, and war has historically been how states and empires expand externally. From the ancient Greeks to the Ottomans and onward, conquering and controlling foreign lands and peoples has been the norm. However, while over 80 percent of interstate conflicts from 1648 to 1945 resulted in territorial redistribution, just 30 percent of such conflicts did so from 1946 to 2000. 1 International territorial disputes continue-there are at least 109 ongoing cases-but they take on different forms as nation-states and the international community attempt to align or "right-size" political and human borders. 2 To the extent that states like Russia, Armenia, and China have sought to extend their territorial control in recent years, they have largely done so in areas with high concentrations of co-ethnic nationals, such as Crimea, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Taiwan, respectively. 3 States have made hundreds of irredentist claims since 1945, including attempts to forcibly annex nineteen different territories with co-ethnics, from Albania in Kosovo to Pakistan in Kashmir. 4 Not coincidentally, some of these areas have higher numbers of co-ethnics due to previous attempts at "demographic engineering," such as "Russianization" in the Caucasus. 5 An increasing amount of scholarship provides valuable explanations of the dynamics and outcomes of these territorial disputes, but the vast majority focus on states: why do states make territorial claims, initiate conflict, and resolve some disputes, but not others? 6 The literature suggests that states direct changes in territorial control and international borders, and that non-state groups-whether they are local councils, militias, or individual migrants or settlers-are relatively inconsequential. We argue, however, that state behavior is often preceded in time and superseded in importance by the actions of these smaller, less organized groups on the contested ground. Modern territorial expansion faces three significant constraints: 1) norms of "border fixity" that aim to preserve the status quo; 2) norms of self-determination that seek to