Territorial Status Quo Research Articles

Regime of military occupation, human rights, elections and referendums: case of Ukraine

From 2014 until today, parts of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine are under international legal regime of military occupation. To realize one of its intentions - to change the territorial status quo by force of arms - Russia uses such tools as elections and referendums in the temporarily occupied parts of Ukraine. The article characterizes the legal regime of the military occupation, focuses attention on ensuring the rights and freedoms of citizens and the legal regime on the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine, emphasizes that the elections and referendums held by Russia have nothing to do with direct forms of democracy. These are legally invalid measures organized by the occupation administrations as an attempt to illegally annex Ukrainian territories by the Russian Federation. Their results do not have any legal consequences and cannot be accepted and recognized by the international community. Also focusing on the regime of military occupation, the authors of the article emphasize that occupation does not mean the loss of sovereignty of the occupied territory. Territorial supremacy of the state is directly related to state sovereignty and is one of its constituent elements. The occupation is characterized by the preservation of power structures and the continuation of resistance and military operations against the occupying state.
 The decisions of the UN International Court of Justice and the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg) are analyzed. It is emphasized that the methods used by the Russian Federation to achieve the goal of including the territories of Ukraine, in which the Russian Federation held «referendums» and elections, were aggressive, the decisive factor was the military power of the Russian Federation, which came into force and met the resistance of sovereign independent Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. It is emphasized that Russia commits war crimes and uses «means of terrorism», one of which is the financing of so-called elections and referendums in the territories of Ukraine temporarily occupied by Russia. Ukraine carries out armed resistance to the inclusion of the territories of Ukraine in which the Russian Federation held «referendums» («referendums» in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk and Luhansk regions), reacts negatively to manifestations of territorial sovereignty on the part of the Russian Federation, and Ukraine also demonstrates by its behavior, that the referendums held by the Russian Federation in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions are unconstitutional, and their results and the acceptance of the territories of Ukraine into the Russian Federation do not have legal force.

The Burden of a Violent Past: Formative Experiences of Repression and Support for Secession in Catalonia

AbstractThis letter studies the impact of past violence and repression on current territorial preferences in a contemporary democracy. Does a violent past lay the grounds for pro-secessionist preferences, or does it lead individuals to cling on to the territorial status quo? We study whether exposure to the events of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath made people more or less likely to support Catalan secession from Spain. Our analysis employs a dataset that combines a large N of individual-level survey data with historical data about repression and violence in each Catalan municipality. Findings indicate that current preferences for secession tend to diminish among the oldest Catalan generation that was exposed to higher levels of violence in their municipality. Most crucially, we show that exposure to violence created a sense of apathy towards politics among the oldest cohort, which eventually leads to a lower predisposition to support secession, a feeling that was not transmitted to subsequent generations. Our findings qualify some of the existing knowledge on the effects of past political violence on present political attitudes.

Illegal: The Recourse to Force to Recover Occupied Territory and the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

Abstract The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, and its lingering aftermath, have put the fundamental and largely unsettled question of the jus ad bellum in the spotlight: when part of one state’s territory is occupied by another state for a prolonged duration, can the former state have lawful recourse to military force to recover its land? Prior to the 2020 conflict, the Nagorno-Karabakh region was widely regarded as belonging de jure to Azerbaijan, but as being unlawfully occupied – for more than 25 years – by Armenia. Accordingly, was Azerbaijan entitled to claim self-defence to lawfully recover it, even though the pre-2020 territorial status quo in the region had existed for more than a quarter of a century? In addition, could Azerbaijan invoke self-defence again in the near or distant future to recover those remaining parts of territory that continue to be outside of its control now that a new ceasefire is being enforced in the region? The answers to these questions have ramifications that extend far beyond the Caucasus, being of relevance for a wide range of pending conflicts around the globe. Upon closer scrutiny, the present authors believe that a negative answer is in order.

Preferences in Between: Moderates in the Catalan Secessionist Conflict

Recent research on territorial preferences focuses on explaining who supports or opposes independence. However, this research overlooks the relevance of an “intermediate” category of citizens who may oppose the territorial status quo of a sub-state territory but not support independence. We use evidence from the critical case of Catalonia to illustrate the relevance of individuals with such preferences for policies and outcomes highly relevant to secessionist conflicts. We present four sets of findings using two-wave panel data from December 2017 (just prior to the December regional elections when Catalan independence was the most salient and contentious issue) and September 2018. First, we find that a sizable plurality within Catalonia supports greater autonomy short of independence; conventional sociodemographic variables explaining support for independence do not strongly account for this preference. Second, such pro-autonomy individuals have considerably more intermediate attitudes regarding the key “on the ground” actions that the Spanish and Catalan governments pursued during the crucial independence drive in 2017. They were more opposed than pro-independence individuals to the unilateral independence efforts, and more opposed than pro-status quo individuals to the Spanish government’s actions to counter these efforts. Third, they expressed emotions around the secessionist conflict similar to pro-status quo individuals. Finally, using an embedded survey experiment, we find that pro-autonomy individuals are more trusting of both the central and regional governments regarding their abiding by an agreement to resolve the conflict, and are less easily “polarized” through priming. Overall, these findings indicate the importance of further analyzing individuals with intermediate territorial views in secessionist conflicts.

Internalization of inferiority and colonial system justification: The case of Puerto Rico

AbstractSince the U.S. military invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898, the Caribbean island has been an “unincorporated territory” of the United States. Today, the island faces the worst economic, political, and humanitarian crisis in its modern history. Despite major disadvantages associated with the present situation, many Puerto Ricans continue to support U.S. hegemonic rule by either maintaining the territorial status quo or calling for a full annexation of Puerto Rico as a U.S. state. To better understand these attitudes, we synthesized insights from decolonial theory and system justification perspectives and administered surveys to 344 adults in San Juan, P.R. from 2017 to 2019. Results revealed that, as hypothesized, internalization of inferiority (outgroup favoritism) and epistemic motivation (need for cognitive closure) were associated with Puerto Ricans’ justification of the colonial system. Furthermore, colonial system justification was a significant mediator of the effects of internalization of inferiority and epistemic motivation on support for the territorial status quo and U.S. statehood—as well as rejection of national independence. Implications of these findings and the relevance of the overarching theoretical framework for the study of cultural and political psychology in other colonial and “post‐colonial” contexts are discussed.

The division of Ireland and its foes: The centenary of resistance to partition

AbstractCritics of partition argue that it contributes to the perpetuation, rather than the amelioration, of territorial conflict. This paper engages with the theoretical debates on partition, focusing on the particular and illustrative case of Ireland. The island has been partitioned into two polities for a century. Opposition to the partition of Ireland has existed from the outset to the contemporary Brexit context. The argument is that while hostility to partition has experienced different forms, namely, political and violent and different degrees of intensity, there is a historical continuum of contestation against partition in Ireland. While the territorial issue was calmed by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Brexit has reanimated the border question, providing political momentum for those who aim to challenge the territorial status quo.

Borneo – trudna przeszłość, poplątane tożsamości. Indonezyjsko-malajska konfrontacja 1963–1966

Borneo, the largest of the Sunda Islands, was already divided during the colonial period. Its southern part belonged to the Dutch East Indies. To the north, there were the territories of North Kalimantan, part of the British Federation of Malaya. The President of the Republic of Indonesia, Ahmed Sukarno, supported anti-colonial movements around the world. Moreover, in 1962, Indonesia launched a military operation that attached West Irian, a Dutch overseas territory in the eastern tip of New Guinea. This operation gained international support.When Great Britain revised its Far East policy in the late 1950s, London gave independence to the Federation of Malaya, known as Malaysia since that time. From then on, the country was part of the Commonwealth of Nations. President Sukarno, remembering the success of the 1962 operation, considered newly established Malaysia to be only a new incarnation of English colonial politics. In April 1963, Jakarta began invading northern Borneo to annex these lands to Indonesia. The invasion met with strong resistance from the Commonwealth of Nations. After three years of struggle, the territorial status quo from before the conflict was re-established. The invasion and its high costs shook President Sukarno’s position. As a result, he was overthrown by General Suharto and the previously pursued policy of supporting anti-colonialism ended, although Indonesia remained a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, one of whose spiritual fathers was Ahmed Sukarno.

Defensive Defense: A Better Way to Protect US Allies in Asia

US strategy in East Asia is defensive—seeking to maintain the territorial status quo and to preserve open trade and investment. The military component of that strategy largely involves helping alli...

La política exterior de Estados Unidos en Asia a la deriva: de Barack Obama a Donald Trump

This article analyzes the foreign policy of the United States in Asia, where a fragile status quo with the presence of the United States was established, after falling a traditional vertical and hierarchical States system in the nineteenth century and going through the vagaries of conflicts and wars in the first half of the twentieth century. The main focus will be given to the administration of Barak Obama that introduced a major change on the issue, as well as the current administration of Donald Trump with the tendency to return to the isolationism of the United States. In the twentieth century the superpower had a diplomatic-strategic policy of committing itself to the «liberal international order» based on liberal representative democracy and the free market economy, and avoiding the emergence of a hegemonic country in Western Europe and Asia. This policy was based on the bipartisan consensus among the political decision-makers of Washington, D.C. that gave greater importance to Western Europe. The Obama administration changed this diplomatic-strategic line, and gave priorityto Asia, while its optimism and idealism regarding China’s position, along with other diplomatic-economic considerations, allowed the giant of Asia to take a series of acts that caused the change to the territorial status quo. The new diplomatic-strategic line of Obama did not take root in the United States in the end, and with Trump’s coming to power, United States’ policy in Asia has become more confused and contradictory. Although it has become clear that Trump is not interested in maintaining and promoting the «liberal international order», it is still not known exactly what direction or line the Trump administration will take in relation to the political-strategic agenda of relations with Asia. From Obama to Trump, the policy of the superpower in Asia has been going adrift.

Кліважування простору північного Причорномор’я: геополітичні суперечки в епоху пост-правди.

The Black Sea Region, during the centuries, has been stayed as a zone of geopolitical confrontation between borderland states of Bulgaria, Russia, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova and others. Each of them, building geopolitical capacity, considers the region as a part of space of ethnogenesis, natiogenesis and politogenesis.The modern regionalism in political practices of the neighbouring states of the Black Sea Region has demonstrated different processes. In one case, it is the mechanism of decentralization and liberalization within global integrational tendencies, in other case – the practise of realization of Post-Imperial geopolitical ideologies. In such case, it is consequently directed to ruin territorial Status Quo. These processes on the stage of emergence and formation of the “soft power” policy have been developed in the form of “nation and justice revival” policy.The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the features of the Black Sea Region as borderland region and trans-boundary system, and to focus on the new features of social and informational spaces. Thus, emergence of the new actors – regional societies and local ethnocultural and diasporal groups on the political stage caused co-existence of different versions of historical “truth”, political expediency, social justice in the region.The paper demonstrates that informational and communicational spaces became the arena for political actions of the states that conduct purposeful cultural and memorial policy. The aim of such measures has been declared the care of compatriots, preservation of memory about common past, making conditions for integration of the region to the semiotic and institutional state system.It was concluded that all subjects of regional geopolitical relations consider the transboundation of the Northern Black Sea Region as a strategic space for further national development. It is noted that national strategies in the early twenty-first century were transformed to expanded interpretation of nations that came out along the state borders and included their compatriots who lost their citizenship, related ethnic groups, as well as historical and ethnogenetic spaces that in the past belonged to the states and are understood as lost.

The Emerging Military Balance in East Asia: How China's Neighbors Can Check Chinese Naval Expansion

Many analysts argue that China will soon dominate East Asia militarily. In reality, China is far from achieving this goal and will remain so for the foreseeable future. China's maritime neighbors have developed antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities that can deny China sea and air control throughout most of its near seas, and China cannot afford the power-projection capabilities it would need to overcome these A2/AD forces. This regional balance of power enables the United States to preserve the territorial status quo in East Asia at moderate cost and risk to U.S. military forces.

Schmitt’s Telluric Partisan in American Entertainment Media: Fantasies of Resistance and Territorial Defence

This article explores the political significance of the narratives of partisan warfare that appear in American popular culture. I draw on Carl Schmitt’s concept of the ‘telluric partisan’ – a figure that fights outside the normative boundaries of conventional war in defence of a homeland and the traditional identities that are rooted in it. These fantasies provide a sense of moral clarity, promote national unity, characterise enemy aggression, and glorify traditional values. They establish a ready-made narrative that can be invoked to frame conflicts in terms of the heroic defence of an innocent and victimised people protecting themselves against foreigners and their dangerous ideologies. As I show, this call for popular engagement in war generally serves a conservative project of directing potentially revolutionary expressions of populism and vigilante justice into defence of family and the territorial status quo.

The Annexation of Crimea and the Boundaries of the Will of the People

AbstractThe secession of Crimea and—more broadly—the conflict in Ukraine reopened questions concerning the limits of a democratic expression of the will of the people and the use of force in order to procure annexation of a territory belonging to another State. This article seeks to clarify the law governing the change of the legal status of a territory through secession and merger with another state. It argues not only that the right of self-determination does not grant an entitlement to alter the legal status of a territory, but also that general international law does not prohibit such an alteration. The rules of international law favor the stability of theexistinginternational borders and thus the territorial status quo, but this does not mean that a unilateral attempt at altering an existing territorial arrangement automatically constitutes an internationally wrongful act. Any change of the legal status of a territory becomes illegal, however, upon anoutsideuse of force. Such an illegality cannot be “cured” by a democratically expressed will of the people.

The Contemporary Relevance of István Bibó’s Theoretical Framework for Analyzing and Settling Territorial and State-Formation Conflicts

International policy makers, even those with a genuine resolve for peacemaking, often shy away from getting involved with political conflicts where the principle of self-determination clashes with that of the territorial integrity of a state, or devise ad hoc plans that don’t have the potential to become a lasting solution. In the Cold War context of the 1970s social scientist Istvan Bibó observed and explained this phenomenon and suggested a mechanism to correct it. His idea was to set up a special international court for impartial political arbitration and to solve “territorial and state-formation conflicts” by the principle of national self-determination. He proposed to recognize the global territorial status quo as the “constitution of international relations” but to “amend it” by fostering ethnic-linguistic separation in the special case of irreconcilable conflicts. Viewed from today Bibó’s case studies of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Cyprus question have shown remarkable foresight and several of his specific suggestions have become core elements in roadmaps for solving them. Additionally, in contemporary political and scientific discourses on other ethnic-territorial conflicts, opinions seem to shift in line with his views as experiences of the last decades seem to corroborate the validity of his analytical framework and general policy recommendations.

The Asia Mess: How Things Did Not Turn Out As Planned

Clearly, something has gone wrong with the U.S. Asian policy that has now been in place for more than forty years. Today, China possesses military and economic power undreamed of in the 1970s. And it has embarked on a course that seeks fundamentally to alter the political and territorial status quo in Asia while using military force as she seeks to acquire territories she claims, far from her continental territory. This article surveys how this new situation developed and details the problems it poses. It concludes that neither we nor our allies understand the present situation and are caught unprepared. The situation can be managed and retrieved to be sure, but not without some major and quite unexpected changes.

International Law and the Consolidation of Peace Following Territorial Changes

Why are some changes to the territorial status quo sustained over time while others are subject to new challenges and ongoing dispute? This article examines variation in the sustainability of territorial change, arguing that under certain conditions, international law facilitates the consolidation of the new territorial order. Specifically, when international law supports the new status quo, it helps solve enforcement problems associated with international cooperation by generating precedent-based costs for issuing a new challenge. If a territorial loser has other ongoing territorial disputes in which it enjoys a legal advantage, it will avoid challenging its current loss out of fear that doing so would establish a precedent for nonadherence to the law in territorial settlement and would therefore jeopardize its bargaining strength in other ongoing disputes. We test this argument on an original dataset of territorial changes and settlements during territorial disputes, 1945–2009. Empirical results strongl...

Enforced Pacific Settlement or Guaranteed Mutual Defence? British and US Approaches to Collective Security in the Eclectic Covenant of the League of Nations

It is rarely pointed out that in pioneering collective security the Covenant of the League of Nations contained two approaches to that policy: enforced pacific settlement favoured in moderate-minimum form by the British (and in particular Lord Robert Cecil); and guaranteed mutual defence, promoted by President Wilson. Though not incompatible, they had very different political resonances. Enforced pacific settlement could be introduced gently, by limiting the pacific-settlement procedures that states were required to follow. By contrast, guaranteed mutual defence looked like a commitment to fight, not for international law, but for every detail of a controversial political and territorial status quo. Thus the Covenant's central element was a British scheme for enforced delay and inquiry, and its Achilles’ heel was Article 10, insisted upon by Wilson but rejected by the Senate. In consequence, the most effective provisions of an incoherent Covenant proved to lie outside the area of collective security, particularly in preventive diplomacy and world services.

The New Cispadana Motorway. Impact on Industrial Buildings Property Values

Infrastructures, through externalities, modify the territorial status quo: by creating advantages and disadvantages, they lead to inequalities and territorial cohesion problems, calling for a setup of territorial equalization mechanisms. In this paper, the estimation of the costs and benefits generated from the building of the new Cispadana regional motorway (Emilia-Romagna Region, Italy) is described. The study focuses on the price variations of the industrial buildings property values in the real estate market after the new motorway will be built, aiming at developing a forecasting method, which could be repeatable and applicable to other kinds of externalities. Thanks to the hedonic pricing method, which is recurring in transport literature, using a multiple linear regression model based on ordinary least squares method (OLS), the contribution of the accessibility on the industrial buildings' pricing has been isolated; it was then possible to forecast the rise in the industrial buildings prices that will be due to the accessibility variation produced by the new infrastructure. The purpose of such a procedure is the setup of equalization mechanisms, which can re-balance the territorial effects though he so-called “land value capture” tools. Thanks to a relatively quick phase of development and implementation, the described application could be used as a tool for the ex-ante evaluation of different infrastructure projects and as an ex-post analysis tool for the monitoring of an existing infrastructure. Finally, thanks to the chance to understand the contribution of each territorial feature to the final price of the good, this application could be very useful in participatory planning processes because it could provide a common knowledge base which could be used to support the public administration’s capability of negotiation with the private partner, both in the participatory planning processes and in the public-private partnership procedures.

‘Greetings from the Zonal Border’. Tourism to the Iron Curtain in West Germany

This article investigates the little known phenomenon of tourism to the Iron Curtain, using the example of the inter-German border. The practice of traveling to the demarcation line to see where Germany and Europe were divided peaked during the mid-1960s but was already in full swing by the mid-1950s and lasted until the fall of the border in 1989. Based on archival documents, postcards and tourist guidebooks, the article analyses the growth of a tourist infrastructure on the western side of the inter-German border and situates this travel as a form of ‘dark tourism’. It argues that seeing the border and visualising the partition of the country did little for overcoming it but rather tended to underwrite the political and territorial status quo. In the Cold War battle for public opinion, seeing the border allowed West Germans and their visitors from abroad to juxtapose freedom and prosperity with captivity and decay, thus advertising the superiority of the capitalist model over its socialist other.

Does International Law Promote the Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes? Evidence from the Study of Territorial Conflicts since 1945

In this article, we explain the role of international law in the resolution of territorial disputes from 1945 to 2000. In doing so, we focus on three outcomes of interest. First, when do states choose to revise the territorial status quo through negotiations instead of force? Second, when are states able to reach a final settlement? Third, when do states prefer a process of legal dispute resolution (i.e., adjudication or arbitration) to bilateral negotiations? To answer these questions, we argue that when the legal principles relevant to the dispute are unambiguous and clearly favor one side, a law-based focal point will emerge. This focal point, in turn, facilitates the settlement process by helping leaders overcome distribution problems, a central obstacle in reaching a final agreement. We find strong and consistent empirical support for our hypotheses regarding international law and peaceful dispute resolution.