IMPLICATIONS FOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION

The above review supports the claim that territory is a key to war and to peace. Learning how to manage, settle, or resolve territorial issues will not eliminate all war, but it will do much to reduce a certain class of wars, especially among neighbors.

An important contribution of the empirical research is that it tells us where we should focus our energies. Interstate war is most apt to occur between neighbors and its source is most likely to be territorial. Therefore, we should focus on either keeping such issues off the agenda or reducing their salience or intangibility. Attaining this goal will make for peaceful relations between neighbors over the long term. While territorial conflict between neighbors is not uncommon, the empirical research on territory and peace tells us that once borders are accepted, neighbors need not be at high risk of war. Settling or resolving territorial issues between neighbors can have a high and long-term payoff.

A second contribution of the empirical research is that it makes it clear that territorial disputes do not inevitably end in war; it all depends on how they are handled.

A diplomacy of peace must know the difference between practices that increase the risk of war and those that reduce it. Current research on the steps to war suggests that mediators or other outside parties should encourage disputants to avoid making out­side alliances or building up their military, which increase threat perceptions.

Nevertheless, there are many exits off the road to war.¹¹ If one has a territorial dispute, then one should avoid making outside alliances. If one has already made an alliance after a territorial dispute, war might still be prevented by not building up one's military and engaging in arms races. Lastly, a number of crisis management and even crisis prevention techniques can be employed to break a pattern of repeated militarized confrontations, as was learned in the Cold War (George, 1983; see also Axelrod's (1984) analysis of tit-for-tat strategies). Failing to break a pattern of recurring territorial disputes is the best guarantee of a war. War often arises between neighbors because it is a unilateral way of imposing one's preferred outcome.

A third contribution of the empirical research on territory is to highlight the importance of prevailing norms for the transfer of territory. The modern global system has always had certain norms for the transfer of territory. In the early years, territory was seen as the personal property of monarchs, and it could be transferred through the rules of dynastic succession (including marriage) (Luard, 1986: 101, 110). Sincethe mid-nineteenth century, nationalism and self­determination has been the dominant norm.

Agreement on norms makes it easier to settle a territorial dispute peacefully. Kacowicz (1994: 75-76, 82, 86) provides some statistical evidence that agreement on norms leads to a peaceful transfer of territory about 80% of the time; whereas disagreement over norms leads to a failure to settle the dispute peacefully about 80% of the time.

In this sense, the growth in the body of international law for adjudicating boundary claims is a great asset and provides a separate (legal) decision game that works with norms for transferring territory. As with norms, a main consequence of international law is that it provides a procedure for determining who should win (or who should get what). Like all decision games, it provides an authori­tative allocation of value(s). Agreement on a procedure has two obvious advantages: it provides a way of ending the issue, which may be important if the territory is salient, and it is a procedure that is considerably less costly than war (and more legitimate in today's international society).

Opting for a binding procedure to determine who wins may also be a way for a leader to avoid the domestic costs associated with the continuation of the issue or the possibility of losing territory. Simmons (1999) shows that leaders are more apt to use arbitration to deal with territorial issues in a highly contentious domestic environment to avoid costs associated with a settlement.

For high salience territorial issues, losing in one decision game often means the actor shifts to another strategy and a new game. Similarly, when the status quo state drags on negotiations for years and sometimes decades, as Britain did withArgentina over the FalklandsZMalvinas, it risks a sudden shift to the war game by the revisionist state when an opportune moment arises.

How can one settle or resolve such issues? There seem to be two main obstacles to reaching an agreement. The first is domestic opposition and the second involves emotional attachments that make the issue intangible and difficult to divide. Each of these are areas where conflict resolution efforts have played a role in the past. Overcoming these obstacles greatly increases the likelihood of success.

Sometimes, even when leaders agree on a solution, domestic opposition or the opposi­tion of relevant non-state actors can overturn an agreement. This has been a perennial problem in the Middle East. It must be remembered that someone must stand for peace at the highest levels, if peace is to be attained. Often, leaders who are hardliners or who have been a successful military leader in the past (see Chiozza and Choi, 2003) are more able to push through an agreement, mostly because they are able to control hard-line constituencies. This was certainly the case, respectively, with Nixon in recognizing “Red China” and with de Gaulle in Algeria. One cannot always count on such leaders emerging, however. For conflict resolution to be successful, it often boils down to a question of agenda politics where the right leaders appear at the right moment, often in the context of a hurting stalemate (Zartman, 1989). Kingdon's (1995) model of agenda politics is relevant here.

In the absence of such a concatenation of factors, it is necessary to either impose an agreement externally or think in terms of more long-term processes that will transform the domestic political environment of one or both sides. The external imposition of an agreement is what “great power” diplomacy (e.g.

Another alternative is to try to drain the emotional foundation of the issue that leads to hard-line constituencies in the first place, either by letting the issue lie dormant or by taking a more active role in reframing the issue. When issues that have little tangible value are highly conflictive, as when governments fight over land that has little economic value (as Walter, 2003 finds), the most likely reason is that these issues are commanding emotional attention. Conflict resolution theorists and practitioners have tried to deal with this problem by reframing and reconceptualizing such issues. Instead of treating them as zero sum, they have tried to show how certain solutions can make the issue contention more of a positive sum game or at least not totally zero sum. The art of conflict resolution is to generate a solution that transforms the issue in this manner.¹² The prospect of each side winning something significant reduces hostility.

In ethnic disputes, a simple solution is to separate or partition the territory along ethnic lines when this is possible and both sides accept the nationalism norm. Plebiscites supervised by international organizations provide a procedure for implementing the nationalism norm. Autonomous regional gov­ernments follow the same logic. Tir (2006: Chs 4, 6) finds that territorial transfers are sometimes successful conflict management techniques, especially if the partition does not divide members of the same ethnic group or punish the loser too harshly, but at other times partition can be problematic.

More often than not, ethnic groups are too intermingled for partition to work. Here, one may want to take Burton's (1990) approach, which emphasizes the importance of meeting mutual needs. With ethnicity, this approach would emphasize tolerance of different ways of life and permitting a multilayered use of the same space to practice different cultures. Identity is seen as not zero sum because one's “Spanishness” should not diminish another's “Basqueness” and vice versa. In fact, a tolerance and a granting of space, but not necessarily territory, to each identity are likely to increase mutual security. There may still be other issues, such as social integration, prohibitions on intermarriage, and so forth, but the issue is stripped of its territorial content. Extreme mingling of ethnic groups have led some to emphasize human rights' guarantees to practice one's identity, and this may work even in non-democratic societies, if human rights are not interpreted so broadly that this effort is seen as one of trying to change the form of government.

An important foundation of this solution is what might be called “deterritorializing” the issue. In this case, ethnicity or identity is not tied to owning a particular piece of territory. Instead, the legal structure permits identity to be practiced non-exclusively anywhere (or exclusively in a certain space or time; for example, in special buildings or on certain days).¹³ Separating specific issues from territory can lead to less conflict because the variable that produces violence is not ethnicity, but territory.

This still leaves the problem of the symbolic quality of territorial issues. Here, territory resists settlement because one piece of territory stands for several other' territories. One way of dealing with this problem is to delink the stakes. This tack has proven partially successful in the Middle East where the question of Sinai was separated from the question of the Golan Heights and the West Bank/Gaza. Such an approach has the advantage of reducing the number of actors needed to reach agreement, and not holding the solution hostage to the most hard-line group in the coalition and the most intractable territorial stake in the broader issue.

Part of draining territory of its emotional content and making it less of an intangible stake requires dealing with the sense of rivalry that has made the issue take on these characteristics. The current state of knowledge in the field suggests researchers should not focus their conflict management and resolution techniques solely on specific territorial issues in the hope of ending the conflict entirely. It is important that conflict resolution efforts deal with territorial issues in the context of the larger rivalry in which they are embedded; thereby changing the underlying relationship which has framed the issue so that it is intangible and infused with symbolic and transcendent qualities. Dealing with rivalry also helps reduce the influence of domestic hardliners that stir up historic animosity and make issues difficult to settle between states. By recognizing that their collective mutual interest in conflict resolution will produce benefits (especially economic benefits) that are greater than the benefits of continuing the rivalry, a pair of states can make progress toward ending one of the main sources of disagreement and conflict.