Professor Monica Toft’s latest publication on “Territory and war” in the Journal of Peace Research shows how sophisticated research and analysis is helping to explain the "peculiar features" of territory that impact the instances and outcomes of war.
In the past four decades, scholars have produced a large literature on the relationship between territory and war. The results of this corpus of research clearly demonstrate that armed disputes over territory are a major source of the global distribution of violence and destruction – a trend that appears to be increasing over time.
“This body of research brings increasingly sophisticated insights into the nature of territory and war,” Toft explains. “Ultimately, they reveal that leaders are more willing to risk escalation over territorial issues than over other types of political grievances.”
Toft emphasises that there is an important connection between territorial ‘homeland’ and the onset of war. People and states behave differently in conflicts over their homeland than in conflicts over other sorts of land. "Just consider what is happening in Crimea," adds Toft, "where the conflict centers over who has rightful ownership; with Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars each claiming that the land belongs to them and should be under their group’s exclusive sovereign control."
While we have always suspected that territory and borders matter in explaining conflict, Toft concludes, there remains a great deal of work to be done. Territory has peculiar features that impact whether and how a conflict evolves and ends, and the nature of the peace that follows. New approaches to theorizing and empirical testing, along with more sophisticated forms of analysis, are helping to reveal all the underlying complexities of what brings people to war. Maybe in the future, we'll work out how to avoid it.
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