Unequal Ground: Homelands and Conflict

Abstract

Although there is a deep and wide consensus that international conflict over territory is especially common and destructive, there is less agreement over what it is about territory that leads to these outcomes. Understanding the role of territory in international conflict requires complementing realist and materialist understandings of the value of territory with one grounded in the constructivist theories that dominate studies of nationalism and geography. Doing so recognizes that homeland territoriality, because it raises the value of a specific territory and provides an imperative to establish sovereignty over it, plays a distinctive role in driving international conflict. This article presents a systematic, replicable operationalization of the homeland status of territory that, because it is consistent with constructivist theories of nationalism, can be used to integrate constructivist understandings of the role of territory into quantitative studies of territorial conflict. This measure is then used to test the implication that the loss of subjectively defined homeland territory increases the likelihood of international conflict relative to the loss of nonhomeland territory. The findings that dividing homelands is especially likely to lead to conflict are corroborated by a second novel measure of the homeland status of territory that is based on the identification of co-ethnics in a territory before the border was drawn.Although there is wide agreement that conflict over territory is especially common and destructive, there is less consensus about why that is the case. 1 Understanding the role of territory in international conflict requires complementing realist and materialist understandings of the value of territory with one grounded in the constructivist theories that dominate studies of nationalism and geography. These theories suggest that homeland territoriality, because it raises the value of a specific territory and provides an imperative to establish sovereignty over it, plays a distinctive role in driving international conflict. This article integrates constructivist understandings of the role of territory into quantitative studies of territorial conflict by presenting a systematic, replicable operationalization of the homeland status of territory that is consistent with constructivist theories of nationalism. This measure is then used to test

Aims, claims, and the bargaining model of war

“…The costs of administering a distant and perhaps unruly province could outweigh the benefits of owning it (Herbst, 2000). The territory might also contain people who are undesirable to incorporate, because they are inconsistent with the definition of national identity, because their inclusion would affect the domestic political balance of power, or because of simple xenophobia (Saideman and Ayres, 2008;Mylonas, 2012;Shelef, 2016). 4 As Alesina and Spolaore (2003) emphasize, increasing heterogeneity of the population, which comes with state expansion, can complicate governance, leading to preferences for a smaller state.…”

Contested Ground: Disentangling Material and Symbolic Attachment to Disputed Territory

“…In this view, humans, like other animals, are biologically programmed to keep and protect a territory they perceive as theirs, and are thus more likely to go to war over territorial disputes than other issues (Vasquez, 1993;Johnson and Toft, 2014). A different strand highlights ideology and identity, arguing that the roots of collective identity are grounded in particular homelands (Shelef, 2016;Forsberg, 1996;Hensel, 2012). Newman (1999), for example, argues that attachment to territory is primordial, an element in the formation of group identity forged through a historic process that imbues land with mythical or religious meaning.…”

Recognition Matters!

“…This finding is consequential because public opinion plays an important role in determining both the acceptance and success of partition. Studies examining the success of partitions and the acceptance of new borders tend to emphasize state-and conflict-level variables, or elite-level interactions, over changes in mass attitudes (see, e.g., T. Chapman and Roeder 2007;Sambanis and Schulhofer-Wohl 2009;Lustick 1993;O'Leary, Lustick, and Callaghy 2001;Shelef 2010Shelef , 2015. However, because leaders of self-determination movements must navigate between the demands of the state they are challenging and their own domestic public (Shamir and Shikaki 2010), public opinion can either embolden leaders to make difficult territorial concessions or constrain them.…”