Territorial dispute is a concept rooted in international law that encompasses situations where States claim the same territory. A variety of scholars have defined territorial disputes in different ways but, in any case, they entail disagreements or conflict over some form of territory or a portion of it. Moreover, territorial disputes are generally believed to be more likely than other interstate conflicts to become militarized and to spawn regional or even global wars.
A common assumption is that territorial disputes are prone to escalation to war because they occur over unclear or contested boundary lines. However, there is no clear connection between boundary disputes and violent conflict. Analyses that leverage the issue typology of the CoW-MID data indicate that only 56% of territorial disputes result in militarized confrontations between the competing States and most of these are not triggered by clearly defined demarcations.
The reasons for this apparent disconnection are not only thematic – resource scarcity, locational feature, domestic politics, and geopolitical competition are among the main factors that have decisively influenced territorial disputes – but also quantitative. If poor mapping were the only reason for territorial disputes, one would expect that they should decline as more borders are carefully delimited; exploration of the globe has already been completed, after all, and maps have become a science. However, territorial disputes continue to emerge, and some of them become entangled in the geopolitical games of big-power rivalry and competition.