Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T02:16:38.620Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How should states be shaped? Contiguity, compactness, and territorial rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2015

Jordan Branch
Jordan Branch*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
*
E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the role of spatial shape in the justification, practice, and study of territorial claims, focusing in particular on the concepts of contiguity and compactness. A territory is contiguous if all parts are connected to all other parts, and a territory is compact if all its parts are closely joined or densely packed spatially. Shaping territories to be contiguous and compact is often implicitly taken to be a worthwhile goal, in both empirical and normative assessments of territorial claims. This article focuses directly on these two concepts, taking a novel approach to the study of territory by raising questions about these foundational, but often unexamined, background assumptions. Interrogating territorial shape thus provides a useful means of examining arguments about the justice or legitimacy of the territorial rights attributed to states or peoples. The contingent origins of the concepts of contiguity and compactness suggest that evaluations of territorial shape have sometimes been based on an implicit affective ‘feel’ or emotional reaction as much as on logical or empirical argument. This conclusion allows us to rethink some of our unstated assumptions about the shapes of states and other political territories, and thus to reconsider the justice or legitimacy attributed to those claims.

Keywords

territoryterritorial rightspolitical authorityboundariesstatehoodemotions
Type
Original Papers
Information
International Theory , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agnew, John. 2008. “Borders on the Mind: Re-Framing Border Thinking.” Ethics & Global Politics 1(4):175–191.Google Scholar
Antonsich, Marco. 2008. “EUropean Attachment and Meanings of Europe. A Qualitative Study in the EU-15.” Political Geography 27:691–710.Google Scholar
Banai, Ayalet, and Moore, Margaret. 2014. “Introduction: Theories of Territory Beyond Westphalia.” International Theory 6(1):98–104.Google Scholar
Berger, Stefan. 2010. “The Study of Enclaves—Some Introductory Remarks.” Geopolitics 15:312–328.Google Scholar
Bially Mattern, Janice. 2014. “On Being Convinced: An Emotional Epistemology of International Relations.” International Theory 6(3):589–594.Google Scholar
Bleiker, Roland, and Hutchison, Emma. 2014. “Introduction: Emotions and World Politics.” International Theory 6(3):490–491.Google Scholar
Branch, Jordan. 2014. The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bunce, Valerie. 1999. Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socialism and the State. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Burghardt, Andrew F. 1973. “The Bases of Territorial Claims.” Geographical Review 63(2):225–245.Google Scholar
Cederman, Lars-Erik. 2002. “Endogenizing Geopolitical Boundaries with Agent-Based Modeling.” PNAS 99(3):7296–7303.Google Scholar
Cox, Kevin R. 2002. Political Geography: Territory, State, and Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Crawford, Neta C. 2000. “The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relationships.” International Security 24(4):116–156.Google Scholar
Crawford, Neta C 2014. “Institutionalizing Passion in World Politics: Fear and Empathy.” International Theory 6(3):535–557.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert A., and Tufte, Edward R.. 1973. Size and Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Economist. 2011. “The Land that Maps Forgot.” Economist, February 15. http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/02/enclaves_between_india_and_bangladesh.Google Scholar
Elden, Stuart. 2010. “Land, Terrain, Territory.” Progress in Human Geography 34(6):799–817.Google Scholar
Elden, Stuart 2013. The Birth of Territory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Glassner, Martin Ira. 1993. Political Geography. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Ryan. 2014. “Secession and the Invisible Hand of the International System.” Review of International Studies 40(3):559–581.Google Scholar
Harley, J. B. 2001. In The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, edited by Paul Laxton. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Holbrooke, Richard. 1998. To End a War. New York, NY: Modern Library.Google Scholar
Hooghe, Liesbet, and Marks, Gary. 2009. “Does Efficiency Shape the Territorial Shape of Government?” Annual Review of Political Science 12:225–241.Google Scholar
Hutchison, Emma, and Bleiker, Roland. 2014. “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics.” International Theory 6(3):491–514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeffery, Renee. 2014. “The Promise and Problems of the Neuroscientific Approach to Emotions.” International Theory 6(3):584–589.Google Scholar
Jones, Reece. 2009. “Sovereignty and Statelessness in the Border Enclaves of India and Bangladesh.” Political Geography 28:373–381.Google Scholar
Kolers, Avery. 2012. “Attachment to Territory: Status or Achievement?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42(2):101–124.Google Scholar
Korpela, Kalevi M. 2012. “Place Attachment.” In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology, edited by Susan D. Clayton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733026.013.0009.Google Scholar
Lake, David A., and O’Mahony, Angela. 2004. “The Incredible Shrinking State: Explaining Change in the Territorial Size of Countries.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48(5):699–722.Google Scholar
Logan, John R. 2012. “Making a Place for Space: Spatial Thinking in Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 38:507–524.Google Scholar
Lustick, Ian S. 1993. Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
McDermott, Rose. 2004. Political Psychology in International Relations. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
McDermott, Rose 2014. “The Body Doesn’t Lie: A Somatic Approach to the Study of Emotions in World Politics.” International Theory 6(3):557–562.Google Scholar
Mercer, Jonathan. 2010. “Emotional Beliefs.” International Organization 64(1):1–31.Google Scholar
Mercer, Jonathan 2014. “Feeling Like a State: Social Emotion and Identity.” International Theory 6(3):515–535.Google Scholar
Miller, David. 2012. “Territorial Rights: Concept and Justification.” Political Studies 60:252–268.Google Scholar
Miller, David 2014. “Debatable Lands.” International Theory 6(1):104–121.Google Scholar
Monmonier, Mark. 1995. Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy. New York, NY: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Moore, Margaret. 2014. “Which People and What Land? Territorial Right-Holders and Attachment to Territory.” International Theory 6(1):121–140.Google Scholar
Nine, Cara. 2008a. “A Lockean Theory of Territory.” Political Studies 56(1):148–165.Google Scholar
Nine, Cara 2008b. “Territory is Not Derived from Property: A Response to Steiner.” Political Studies 56:957–963.Google Scholar
Nine, Cara 2012. Global Justice and Territory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nine, Cara 2014. “When Affected Interests Demand Joint Self-Determination: Learning from Rivers.” International Theory 6(1):157–174.Google Scholar
Ochoa Espejo, Paulina. 2014. “People, Territory, and Legitimacy in Democratic States.” American Journal of Political Science 58(2):466–478.Google Scholar
Osiander, Andreas. 2007. Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Penrose, Jan. 2002. “Nations, States and Homelands: Territory and Territoriality in Nationalist Thought.” Nations and Nationalism 8(3):277–297.Google Scholar
Pickles, John. 2004. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pildes, Richard H., and Niemi, Richard G.. 1993. “Expressive Harms, ‘Bizarre Districts,’ and Voting Rights: Evaluating Election-District Appearances After Shaw v. Reno.” Michigan Law Review 92(3):483–587.Google Scholar
Pogge, Thomas W. 1992. “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty.” Ethics 103(1):48–75.Google Scholar
Pollini, Gabriele. 2005. “Elements of a Theory of Place Attachment and Socio-Territorial Belonging.” International Review of Sociology 15(3):497–515.Google Scholar
Ratner, Steven R. 1996. “Drawing a Better Line: Uti Possidetis and the Borders of New States.” The American Journal of International Law 90(4):590–624.Google Scholar
Reus-Smit, Christian. 2014. “Emotions and the Social.” International Theory 6(3):568–574.Google Scholar
Roeder, Philip. 2007. Where Nation-States Come from: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sahlins, Peter. 1989. Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sasley, Brent E. 2010. “Affective Attachments and Foreign Policy: Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords.” European Journal of International Relations 16(4):687–709.Google Scholar
Sasley, Brent E 2011. “Theorizing States’ Emotions.” International Studies Review 13:452–476.Google Scholar
Shaw v. Reno. 1993. 509 U.S. 630 (United States Supreme Court)..Google Scholar
Simmons, A. John. 2001. “On the Territorial Rights of States.” Philosophical Issues 1:300–326.Google Scholar
Spolaore, Enrico. 2012. “The Economics of Political Borders.” Working Paper No. 3854, CESifo, Munich, Germany.Google Scholar
Spruyt, Hendrik. 2005. Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Steinberg, Philip E. 2005. “Insularity, Sovereignty, and Statehood: The Representation of Islands on Portolan Charts and the Construction of the Territorial State.” Geografiska Annaler 87:253–265.Google Scholar
Steiner, Hillel. 2008. “May Lockean Doughnuts Have Holes? The Geometry of Territorial Jurisdiction: A Response to Nine.” Political Studies 56:949–956.Google Scholar
Stilz, Anna. 2009. “Why Do States Have Territorial Rights?” International Theory 1(2):185–213.Google Scholar
Stinnett, Douglas M., Tir, Jaroslav, Diehl, Paul F., Schafer, Philip, and Gochman, Charles. 2002. “The Correlates of War (CoW) Project Direct Contiguity Data, Version 3.0.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 19(2):59–67.Google Scholar
Sumner, Brian Taylor. 2004. “Territorial Disputes at the International Court of Justice.” Duke Law Journal 53:1779–1812.Google Scholar
Thongchai, Winichakul. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.Google Scholar
Vanzo, John P. 1999. “Border Configuration and Conflict: Geographical Compactness as a Territorial Ambition of States.” In A Road Map to War: Territorial Dimensions of International Conflict, edited by Paul F. Diehl, 73–121. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.Google Scholar
Wood, Denis. 2010. Rethinking the Power of Maps. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Zenker, Olaf. 2011. “Autochthony, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Nationalism: Time-Honouring and State-Oriented Modes of Rooting Individual–Territory–Group Triads in a Globalizing World.” Critique of Anthropology 31(1):63–81.Google Scholar