Territorial dispute involves a conflict over the ownership or control of a particular territory. It is a common form of international conflict. It is often seen as a potential path to war, but scholars have found that it tends to be less militarized than other types of disputes.
While research on territorial disputes has made some progress, it is still difficult to define what constitutes a territorial dispute. The debate over definitions is a significant impediment to the study of this phenomenon. In the absence of a clear definition, studies have run the risk of either including cases that are not really territorial or running the risk of missing out on territorial disputes that may be latent and dormant but are in danger of becoming active.
To avoid this problem, a number of scholars have proposed narrow definitions of territorial disputes. Stephen Kocs, for example, defines a territorial dispute as “any dispute between states that is contentious and entails the claiming of sovereign territory.” Other scholars have taken a more legalistic approach to the question of what constitutes a territorial dispute. For example, Allcock and colleagues have defined a territorial dispute as “a boundary demarcation dispute between two or more States in which one State contests the legitimacy of the other’s claims to sovereignty” while leaving out maritime boundary issues.
Moreover, many scholars have attempted to link territorial disputes to the likelihood of militarized conflict by emphasizing their geographic contiguity or national attributes of disputants. Such analyses, however, are not only inconclusive but can be misleading. As Paul Senese has pointed out, there is a strong correlation between conflict and military power, but geography does not necessarily lead to militarized conflict.