Territorial disputes and individual willingness to fight

Published date01 May 2020
Date01 May 2020
DOI10.1177/0022343319880952
Subject MatterRegular Articles
Territorial disputes and individual
willingness to fight
Nam Kyu Kim
Department of Political Science & Diplomacy, Sungkyunkwan University
Abstract
Extant scholarship establishes that territorial issues are more likely than other types of issues to lead to militarized
interstate disputes and war. One key premise is that a strong attachment to the material and symbolic values of the
homeland makes people more willing to fight for their country in territorial disputes. However, there is no systematic
evidence for this premise. Although recent studies investigate the effect of territorial conflict on individual attitudes
and find that territorial issues are qualitatively different from other types of issues, researchers have not yet inves-
tigated how territorial threats influence people’s willingness to fight. By combining data on territorial claims from the
Issue Correlates of War project with individual-level data from the World Values Survey, this article tests the
relationship between territorial claims and individuals’ willingness to fight. My analysis reveals that respondents are
more willing to fight for their country when their countries experience territorial claims. Building on the contentious
issues approach, I further demonstrate the importance of issue salience and issue context in the relationship between
territorial claims and willingness to fight. Last, I show that the relationship between territorial claims and willingness
to fight depends on a country’s level of economic development or regime type.
Keywords
democracy, development, fight, territory, war
An extensive body of empirical research explores how
and why states engage in international conflict. One
well-established finding is that of all the issues over
which states could contend, territorial issues are most
salient and threatening to both political leaders and pub-
lics because of their tangible and intangible attributes.
Many studies have found that territorial disputes are
most difficult to resolve peacefully and are most prone
to militarized conflict and war. They show that territorial
disputes are one of the main causes of militarized con-
flicts and their escalation to interstate war (e.g. Huth,
1996; Hensel, 2001; Hensel & Mitchell, 2005; Senese
& Vasquez, 2008).
One critical assumption in the territorial conflict lit-
erature is that people are more willing to fight for their
country when their territory is in dispute because people
tend to have stronger attachments to territory due to its
material and symbolic value than other issues. Vasquez
(2009) even argues that humans have the natural ten-
dency to occupy and, if necessary, defend territory and
that this tendency is deeply ingrained into our collective
genetic inheritance. According to him, humans’ ten-
dency toward aggressive behavior in disputes over terri-
tory is the key to the relationship between territories and
interstate conflict. Nevertheless, to the best of my knowl-
edge, no direct evidence is currently available to test this
assumption. Although recent studies investigate the
effect of territorial conflict on individual attitudes and
find that territorial issues are qualitatively different from
other types of issues (e.g. Hutchison & Gibler, 2007;
Gibler, Hutchison & Miller, 2012; Miller, 2017),
researchers have not yet investigated how territorial
threats influence people’s willingness to fight. This is
puzzling, given the large number of studies in the terri-
torial conflict literature that implicitly or explicitly rely
on that assumption.
Corresponding author:
namkkim1@gmail.com
Journal of Peace Research
2020, Vol. 57(3) 406–421
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0022343319880952
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This article systematically examines the effect of ter-
ritorial disputes on people’s willingness to fight. I not
only test whether people are more willing to fight for
their country when their territory is in dispute but also
consider the importance of issue salience, issue context,
and a country’s role in the dispute in explaining the
relationship between territorial claims and willingness
to fight. In so doing, I build on the contentious issues
approach (e.g. Diehl, 1992; Hensel, 2001; Hensel et al.,
2008). Last, I further examine whether the effect of
territorial claims on citizens’ willingness to fight is con-
ditional on certain country-level factors – the level of
economic development and regime type. If, as existing
studies show, economic development and democracy
encourage peaceful resolution of interstate disputes, they
can also moderate the effect of territorial disputes on
individual willingness to fight.
Using individual-level data from the World Values
Survey (WVS) spanning 56 countries, this article
examines the relationship between territorial claims
and individual willingness to fight. I rely on the Issue
Correlates of War (ICOW) project’s territorial claims
dataset to obtain information on territorial disputes.
Three main findings stand out. First, the analysis
confirms that the presence of ongoing territorial
claims is associated with an increased willingness to
fight. Second, it demonstrates the importance of issue
salience and issue context. When faced with certain
types of territorial claims (e.g. more salient claims on
intangible issues or claims with a recent history of
armed conflict), people are more willing to fight for
their country. Third, little evidence indicates the
importance of distinguishing between claim challen-
gers and targets in influencing the willingness to fight.
This result fits well with the finding that ‘recovering
lost territory has been a significant motivating factor
in claim initiation’ (Frederick, Hensel & Macaulay,
2017: 104). Last, the result shows that the effect of
territorial claims on individual willingness to fight is
substantially weakened when the level of economic
developmentishighorthecountryisdemocratic.
These results provide strong empirical evidence for
the previously untested assumption underlying the
voluminous literature on territorial issues and their
consequences for conflict processes, conflict out-
comes, and domestic politics. The findings presented
in this article also contribute to the growing literature
on territorial threats and individual attitudes. Terri-
torial threats are found to be associated with lower
levels of political or social tolerance (Hutchison &
Gibler, 2007; Tir & Singh, 2015), negative attitudes
toward other disputant countries (Igarashi, 2018; Kuo
& Huang, 2019), identification with national self-
identification (Gibler, Hutchison & Miller, 2012),
and preference of strong leaders (Miller, 2017). Some
studies utilize a survey experiment to explore how
historical ownership influences the bargaining posi-
tion of the public in a territorial dispute (Fang &
Li, 2016; Fang et al., 2019) and to explain variation
in public opinion over territorial disputes (Tanaka,
2016). Along with these studies, this article confirms
that territorial disputes significantly shape people’s
willingness to fight for their country.
Territory and conflict
The existing scholarship on international security
increasingly points out the important of issues under
contention. It demonstrates that the degree of conflict
and cooperation among states tends to differ substan-
tially across different issues. Scholars identify territory
as the most salient and dangerous issue that states
fight over (Diehl, 1992; Hensel, 2001; Vasquez,
2009). Because territories carry significant material
and symbolic values, states are most likely to resort
to military force to achieve goals regarding territorial
control. Two states often view the same territory as
indivisible and perceive contention over territory in
zero-sum terms (Goddard, 2006; Hassner, 2003;
Toft, 2005). This makes territorial disputes more dif-
ficult to resolve peacefully. Additionally, territorial
disputes provoke strong nationalistic sentiments,
which makes compromise in territorial disputes polit-
ically untenable. Repeated disputes over territory
increase the political power of hardliners in the lead-
ership, which encourages the adoption of aggressive
policies and makes wars more likely (Huth, 1996;
Vasquez, 2009).
A large number of empirical studies support this
claim. Territorial disputes are found to be the source
of the vast majority of militarized conflicts, wars, and
rivalries. Territorial disputes are more likely to result in
violent conflict than disputes over other issues (Hensel,
2001). Holsti (1991) shows that more than three-
quarters of all wars between 1648 and 1989 involved
disagreementsoverterritory. According to Hensel
(2012), more than one-quarter of all militarized inter-
state disputes between 1816 and 2001 and about the half
of all fatal disputes and full-scale wars have involved
contention over territorial issues. Furthermore, disputes
over territorial issues are more likely to escalate and be
deadlier (Senese, 1996). Last, conflicts over territory are
Kim 407

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