INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND

Territorial issues have often been a focus of diplomatic efforts in the international com­munity. A fairly large body of international law exists dealing with boundary disputes. Similarly, territorial disagreements have been at the center of the efforts of international institutions—such as the International Court of Justice and boundary disputes.

While realist approaches have dominated much of international relations (IR) theory, this is not to say that theories of conflict focusing on territory as a unique source of conflict have not been constructed. Many of these have looked at territory through bio­logical and evolutionary lenses (see Ardrey, 1966), but these have usually been dismissed in political science as overly deterministic. As the social sciences have become more influenced by post-modernism and construc­tivism, such approaches have fallen even further out of favor, while such seemly biological concepts, like territoriality, have been reconceptualized in constructivist terms (Sack, 1986; Blanchard, 2005).

In recent years, this has changed. First, advances in the life sciences, including ethol­ogy and neuroscience, have made political scientists argue that their theories cannot ignore the insights and research of these disciplines in explaining human behavior and decision making (Masters, 1989; Rosen, 2005). Within international relations, most scholars who take work in the life sciences seriously adopt a non-deterministic approach, like Vasquez (1993), who in his territorial explanation of war argues that humans are both genetically predisposed to certain behaviors (like territorial conflict) but are also able to change behavior in response to ideas (what Somit, 1990: 569 calls “soft-wired” as opposed to “hard-wired”).

New research in evolutionary psychology and on the biological and neuro-psychological basis of territoriality has added to our understanding of where territoriality comes from (see Alcock and O'Neill, 1987; Buss, 1995). While this work is often grounded in socio-biological assumptions, its findings still must be dealt with. Related to this perspective is the issue of crimes of passion and how they may be associated with territory. Even though research on individuals may not apply to collectivities, one of the more relevant insights of this work is that the emotional/biological response to territorial questions is conditioned by our evolutionary past (Simmons, 1998). Since collectivities, do seem to respond to territorial issues in a manner that is often in excess of a strict cost/benefit analysis, this literature may give us some clues as to why.

A second and more influential reason for the change in attitude has been the release of a new data set on militarized interstate disputes from 1816-1992 by the Correlates of War project (Jones et al., 1996) that includes data on territorial disputes and has led to a surge of quantitative research on territory and war. This has produced some important findings that show that territorial disputes are highly war-prone.

One of the puzzles raised by this research is why territorial issues can be so intractable when on the surface it appears that terri­tory is both tangible and divisible. Some answers place great emphasis on reputation effects (Walter, 2003). Reputation is cer­tainly a component, but in and of itself it is too narrow an emphasis to provide a complete answer, and it overlooks other processes that can be useful for conflict resolution. Quite some time ago, Mansbach and Vasquez (1981: 234-250) pointed out that conflict and cooperation consists of three separate but interrelated dimensions— opinion (agreement-disagreement), behav­ior (positive and negative acts, e.g. car­rots and sticks), and psychological attitude (friendship-hostility). They hypothesize that over time, persistent disagreement leads to an over-reliance on negative acts and coercion. These acts instead of changing the issue position of the other side engender psycho­logical hostility, which in turn encourages disagreement.

Such a vicious circle directly affects the way issues are framed. A conflict spiral can transform concrete and tangible stakes, such as territory, by infusing them with symbolic and even transcendent qualities. Symbolic stakes are more intractable because giving in implies giving in on all the other stakes they represent or, at minimum, setting a precedent that will lead to a slippery slope of losses (here is where a reputation effect is most relevant). Transcendent stakes involve a further and different transforma­tion. Here, the conflict process makes the stake representative of very salient (typically moral) values, like freedom, honor, and identity.

Infusing concrete stakes with symbolic and transcendent qualities makes them intangible and difficult to divide. Territory often becomes infused with these qualities in the conflict process. For Serbs, the land at Kosovo Polje is not just the earth with a certain mineral content; it is where the battle of Kosovo took place in 1389.

As stakes become more symbolic and transcendent, they encourage disagreement, which in turn leads to more negative coercive acts, which then leads to more hostility. At the same time, a shift to more symbolic and transcendent stakes leads the contending actors to make certain kinds of proposals for the disposition of an issue. In brief, symbolic and transcendent stakes lead actors basically to make zero-sum proposals for settling the issue. Proposals of this type give one side all the benefits and make the other bear all the costs. This is because such stakes tend to be intangible and cannot be divided, thereby encouraging proposals of the winner-take-all type.²

The above analysis should make it clear that it is not conflicts that are intractable, but issues that are intractable. Theory and research will be more productive if we think in terms of intractable issues, rather than intractable conflicts. What makes some conflicts difficult to resolve is that the underlying issue has certain characteristics, like its being intangible or over territory that has been infused with symbolic qualities. These in turn lead to zero-sum proposals which hamper negotiations.