Brave New Canada by Derek H. Burney

Author:Derek H. Burney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773596221
Publisher: MQUP

INNOVATIVE DIPLOMACY TO ADDRESS BORDER DISPUTES

Contested borders and territories lie at the heart of many of the world’s most difficult and troubled hot spots – East China Sea, Kashmir, Israel versus Palestine, Crimea, the Western Sahara, Gibraltar, North Sudan versus South Sudan, Somaliland, the list goes on. Canada has its own territorial disputes with the United States over the ownership of the navigable waters of the Northwest Passage, and until it was recently resolved, a piece of rock in the Davis Straits called Hans Island, which Denmark claimed. In all, there are more than a hundred major unresolved border and territorial disputes between sovereign entities that could one day escalate into something bigger. While no definitive list of territorial disputes exist, we can offer a few figures to illustrate the range of the phenomenon.

Using data drawn from the cia World Factbook, we counted 149 ongoing disputes between sovereign countries over land borders, river borders, ethnic enclaves, maritime boundaries, and sovereignty over inhabitable islands. While many of these disputes are relatively calm affairs that are being actively resolved via dialogue and negotiation, others are far more tense and involve multiple parties, which complicates any attempt to negotiate a solution. For example, it is not just China that claims parts of the Spratly Islands, a cluster of shoals and reefs in the South China Sea, but also Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei. Fashioning a deal that will satisfy six parties is far more difficult than brokering an agreement between two! Other disputes, such as those along China and India’s Himalayan border increasingly involve shows of military force, suggesting that at least one party thinks that it can get what it wants through muscle rather than diplomacy. Table 3 summarizes some of the characteristics of current territorial disputes, and the relationship between territorial disputes and international conflict since the Second World War. While the number of territorial disputes causing armed conflict has declined in recent years, it remains clear that when governments disagree about who rules where and who owns what, the risk of escalation is very real.

Table 3

International Territorial Disputes, 1946–2013

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