Territorial Ideology and Interstate Conflict : Comparative Considerations

We live in profoundly unsettling times. The daily newspapers are filled with stories about terrorist threats, stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and the efforts of ever more states to acquire nuclear weapons. At the same time, longstanding interstate and intrastate conflicts continue to dominate the lives of people in such diverse settings as Israel-Palestine, southern Sudan, the India-Pakistan border, and the interior of Colombia. The issues that underlie these conflicts are as diverse as their geographic settings, but they share one commonality: they are all framed by the territorial logic of the modern state system. The foregoing statement might seem self-evident for intrastate struggles between ethnic groups or for boundary conflicts between states because these conflicts are clearly tied to the territorial reach of the modern state. Yet even the international terrorist activities associated with movements such as al-Qaeda cannot be understood without reference to prevailing international territorial norms. This is because the existing political-geographic order is a fundamental catalyst for such movements and because responses to international terrorism are often channeled in and through states. Consider, for example, the circumstances of the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. Chief among the articulated reasons for the attack was a sense of eroding political and cultural sovereignty in the Islamic world, as symbolized, for example, by the presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and by the existence of a number of secular, Westernoriented regimes in the region. On the response side of the equation, a major focus of attention for the U.S. administration in the wake of September 11 was “regime change,” first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Against this backdrop, it is clearly important that we seek to understand the territorial logic of the modern state system and its role in different types of conflicts. A great deal of work has been done along these lines in recent decades. Scholars who have focused on the concept of the nation-state have devoted considerable attention to the gap between perception and reality that underlies the concept and have highlighted its pernicious influence in culturally diverse states.