Nationalism and war for territory: from ‘divisible’ territories to inviolable homelands

Belief in territorial indivisibility and public preferences for dispute resolution

“…There is a widely shared view that indivisible issues or goods are those whose value will be destroyed if they are divided; in this view, issue indivisibility is a binary concept (Fearon, 1995;Brams and Taylor, 1996, 51;Goddard, 2006;Kydd, 2015, 72;Kadercan, 2017;Frieden et al, 2019, 132). Where the scholarship diverges is whether indivisibility is a fundamental nature of an issue, or a social construction emerging entirely from a strategic process (Hassner, 2003;Goddard, 2006Goddard, , 2010Wiegand, 2011).…”

“…There is a long history of countries sharing sovereignty over territories or proposing feasible arrangements to share sovereignty and resources 1 . Thus, a claim of territorial indivisibility cannot find its justification in some objective attribute of a territory (Hassner, 2003; Goddard, 2006; Kadercan, 2017); rather, “it is human beliefs and actions that give territory meaning” (Knight, 1982, 157). What kinds of relationship of a people to a disputed territory may give rise to a belief in territorial indivisibility?…”

Homelands and Nationalism

“…As work in prospect theory has found, since reference points may be aspirational or imagined (Jervis 2004; Kahneman and Tversky 1982; McDermott 1998; Mercer, 2005; Tversky and Kahneman 1981), the loss of homeland territory, even if it occurred long ago, may place individuals in the domain of losses in ways that the loss of non-homeland territory (which may be excluded from the reference point) does not. As a result, the loss of homeland territory would elicit more risk-acceptant behavior to regain it and lower the likelihood that compromises that involve coming to terms with its loss would be accepted (Kadercan 2017; Levy 1996).…”

“…Consistent with these individual-level mechanisms, research has flagged the ability of a territory's symbolic value to increase the salience of territories in conflict and to shape the politics of such cases by mobilizing domestic support, enabling state leaders to fight off domestic challengers, and constraining their ability to make territorial concessions (Goddard 2010;Huth 2000;Kadercan 2017;Mansfield and Snyder 2007;Miller 2007;Snyder 2000;Toft 2003;Vasquez and Valeriano 2008). Hensel and Mitchell (2005), for example, find that while the material values of land shape low-level militarized disputes, territory's ideological salience has a stronger impact on fatal militarized disputes or full-scale interstate wars.…”

“…Nationalism, in other words, combines the potentially apolitical attachment to land with the imperative to exert a group's control over that territory. This binding of nation and territory constrained the territorial horsetrading between polities that had been the norm prior to nationalism's emergence and transformed the loss of homeland territory into something worth dying for (Cederman 2013;Hall 1999;Kadercan 2017;Shelef 2016). This is the case, importantly, for all nations and all nationalisms.…”