Theoretical Perspectives on Territorial Disputes

Why do nations risk war over remote islands, frozen glaciers, or barren stretches of mountain? Territory is one of the most common triggers of armed conflict, yet the reasons states fight over land are far from simple. Political scientists have developed competing theoretical lenses to explain why borders become battlegrounds. Some see cold calculations of power, others see the hidden hand of economic elites, and still others point to identity, memory, and emotion. Understanding these frameworks helps make sense of disputes ranging from the South China Sea to Kashmir.

Why territorial disputes deserve special attention 🔗

Not all international disagreements are equally dangerous. Research on conflict has consistently shown that disputes over territory are among the most frequent sources of war. Land disputes tend to be harder to resolve than disagreements over trade, policy, or diplomacy. They generate hardline interest groups, recur over decades, and carry a weight that other issues rarely match.

What makes territory so explosive? The answer depends on which theory you ask. Each major school of international relations offers a distinct explanation, and each highlights a different dimension of the same problem. No single theory captures everything, which is exactly why studying all of them matters.

The realist perspective: power and survival 🔗

Realism is the oldest and most influential framework in international politics. It starts from a simple premise. The international system is anarchic, meaning there is no world government to enforce rules or settle disputes. In this self-help world, states must rely on their own power to survive. Territory becomes valuable because it adds to a state’s strategic depth, resources, and military reach.

For realists, territorial disputes are fundamentally about shifting power. When a rising state gains strength, it tends to assert claims it previously left dormant. The danger comes less from territory itself and more from how disputes are handled. Scholars associated with the “steps-to-war” framework argue that power-politics behaviour, such as forming alliances and building up arms, sharply raises the risk of escalation. Ironically, the very tools that realists believe deter war can make it more likely.

China’s assertive claims as a realist case 🔗

China’s behaviour in the South China Sea is the textbook illustration of the realist logic. Beijing claims sovereignty over most of the sea, marked on its maps by the controversial nine-dash line, and has overlapping disputes with Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and others. The waters are strategically vital, carrying a huge share of global trade and sitting atop substantial oil and gas reserves.

What stands out is the link between China’s growing capabilities and its assertiveness. Analysts note that as China’s economy and military strength rise relative to its neighbours, Beijing increasingly assumes that resistance to its claims will eventually fade. China has reinforced its position through land reclamation, building artificial islands and military airfields on contested features. Even after an international tribunal ruled against the legal basis of its claims in 2016, China rejected the ruling and continued to press forward. For realists, this is power dynamics in action. Law matters less than the balance of capabilities.

The Marxist perspective: elites, capital, and profit 🔗

Where realism sees states pursuing power, Marxist theory looks beneath the state to ask who actually benefits from territorial conflict. The answer, for Marxists, is the economic and political elite. Disputes are not driven by the broad population but by ruling classes seeking to secure resources, markets, and profit.

This view grew out of the classical Marxist theory of imperialism. Writing during the First World War, Lenin argued that monopoly capitalism, dominated by powerful banks and industrial firms, must constantly expand to find new markets and raw materials. As capitalist powers competed for colonies and resources, their interests clashed and produced conflict. Territorial expansion, in this reading, is the geographic expression of capital’s endless drive to accumulate.

Reading colonial expansion through Marxist eyes 🔗

The clearest historical evidence comes from European colonialism. The 19th-century scramble for Africa and Asia was, for Marxists, “plunder for profit.” Colonies were exploited as sources of cheap raw materials, cheap labour, and captive markets for the goods produced in industrialised Europe. National ruling classes each protected their biggest firms, and inter-imperialist rivalry carved up much of the globe.

A key insight here is that Marxists view nationalism with suspicion. Patriotic appeals to defend the homeland often serve to disguise the material interests of a small elite. The working classes who fight and die in territorial wars rarely gain from them. This perspective remains relevant when analysing modern resource conflicts, where access to oil, minerals, or strategic trade routes shapes the contest over land.

The normative perspective: identity, history, and emotion 🔗

Realism and Marxism share an assumption that disputes are ultimately about material interests, whether power or profit. Normative and constructivist theories challenge this. They argue that many territorial disputes cannot be explained by strategic or economic calculation at all. Instead, the value of territory is socially constructed, deriving from cultural meaning, national history, and identity.

The scholar Tuomas Forsberg made this argument forcefully, suggesting that the traditional focus on strategic and economic interests is often misleading, and that many disputes are better understood through subjective conceptions of justice and international norms. Territory becomes an emotive issue, loaded with normative weight. A piece of land may be economically worthless yet utterly non-negotiable because it is tied to a nation’s sense of self.

This is where constructivism enters. Constructivists emphasise that politics cannot be separated from history, social interaction, and shared identities. While realists and liberals focus on material factors like capabilities and trade, constructivists stress ideational elements: how states perceive themselves and each other, and the meaning they attach to disputed land.

Kashmir as a contest over identity and sovereignty 🔗

The conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is a powerful example of the normative narrative. Material explanations alone struggle to capture why the dispute has endured for over seven decades through repeated wars and crises. The deeper logic lies in identity and the ideological foundations of both states.

For Pakistan, claiming the Muslim-majority territory connects directly to the two-nation theory, the founding idea that Muslims and Hindus constitute distinct nations requiring separate states. Incorporating Kashmir would help vindicate the very reason Pakistan exists. For India, holding Kashmir is tied to its self-image as a secular state in which a Muslim-majority region belongs naturally within a pluralist union. As one analysis puts it, Kashmir functions as a “testing ground” for the legitimacy of the ideational foundations of both states.

Constructivist scholars stress that the rivalry is sustained by shared history and the centrality of “the other” in each nation’s self-conception. The legacy of the 1947 Partition, the proximity of the two states, and the way each defines itself against the other keep the dispute alive. The post-1947 nationalisms in both countries reinforced their differences while ignoring shared cultural and historical parallels. Here, territorial value clearly derives from sovereignty and identity rather than measurable strategic gain.

It is worth noting that this state-centred framing has costs. Scholars point out that when Kashmir is treated purely as a “territorial dispute” between India and Pakistan, the political agency of Kashmiris themselves tends to be pushed aside. The normative lens, in other words, can reveal not just why two states fight but also whose voices get lost in the process.

Comparing the three lenses 🔗

Each theory captures a real feature of territorial disputes. Realism explains why rising powers like China grow assertive and why arms races and alliances raise the stakes. Marxism uncovers the economic interests and elite agendas that often lurk behind patriotic rhetoric, especially in resource-rich regions and in the history of colonialism. Normative and constructivist approaches explain the disputes that material logic cannot, where identity and history make compromise feel like betrayal.

The most useful approach is rarely to pick one theory and discard the rest. Many scholars argue that complex disputes call for a synthetic approach combining the insights of multiple traditions. The South China Sea, for instance, involves strategic power (realism), enormous resource and trade stakes (Marxist economic logic), and questions of national pride and historical claims (constructivism) all at once. Kashmir likewise has strategic and economic dimensions layered beneath its powerful identity politics.

For a student of international politics, the value of these theories is not in finding the “correct” one. It is in learning to ask different questions of the same conflict. Who gains power? Who profits? Whose identity is at stake? A dispute looks different through each lens, and seeing all three gives a fuller picture of why land continues to be worth fighting for.

What do you think? If territory often carries more symbolic and emotional value than material worth, can disputes like Kashmir ever be resolved through purely economic or strategic bargaining? And when you look at a conflict in the news, which of these three lenses do you instinctively reach for first, and what might that reveal about your own assumptions?

References

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343396033004005
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_to_war
3. https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/territorial-disputes-south-china-sea
4. https://www.geostrategy.org.uk/research/the-south-china-sea-historical-and-legal-background/
5. https://www.europeanguanxi.com/post/pragmatic-offensive-realism-in-the-south-china-sea
6. https://www.merip.org/1981/11/the-theory-of-imperialism-and-its-consequences/
7. https://www.counterfire.org/article/marxism-and-imperialism/
8. https://www.e-ir.info/2011/09/07/the-case-for-constructivism-in-analysing-the-india-pakistan-conflict/
9. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322778226_Realist-Constructivism_and_the_India-Pakistan_Conflict_A_New_Theoretical_Approach_for_an_Old_Rivalry
10. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nana.12649
11. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41311-017-0074-4