Diaspora groups link processes of globalization to conflicts over identity and territory. Globalization has increased cross-border migration and decreased communication and travel costs, thereby making it easier for migrants to form diaspora networks that build links between the original homeland and current place of residence. Those forced across borders by war commonly have a specific set of traumatic memories and hence create specific types of “conflict-generated diasporas” that sustain and sometimes amplify their strong sense of symbolic attachment to the homeland. “Homeland” is often understood in specific territorial terms where a space from which a group has been forcefully detached assumes a high symbolic value. Globalization has increased rather than decreased this particular type of territorial attachment and thereby shaped the dynamics of certain homeland conflicts.

Conflict-generated diasporas – with their origins in conflict and their identity linked to symbolically important territory – often play critical roles with regard to homeland conflicts. As other scholars have noted, diaspora remittances are key resources to a conflict and often sustain parties engaged in civil war. In addition, and the focus of this research, such diasporas frequently have a particularly important role in framing conflict issues. Diaspora groups created by conflict and sustained by memories of the trauma tend to be less willing to compromise and therefore reinforce and exacerbate the protractedness of conflicts.

Introduction

In the first half of the twentieth century the study of territory and its role in international politics was very much in fashion among political scientists. Since then, however, the study of territory has lost much of its appeal among political scientists and has largely (but not completely) been left to political geographers. In the last decade or so, however, territory and territoriality have received renewed attention among political scientists. It should not be surprising that scholars in international relations have been at the forefront of this renewed attention to territory and territoriality. The importance of territory has long been recognized in the origins and escalation of disputes between states. Nonetheless, only recently have scholars who put territory front and center in their study of international conflict revealed that disputes over territory are more likely to escalate to war than any other type of dispute (Huth 1996; Diehl 1999b). The importance of territoriality – exclusion by area (Sack 1986) – is less well understood among political scientists, but it seems that some scholars have begun to recognize that territoriality is a, if not the, fundamental ordering principle of the modern state system (see Spruyt 1994; Wagner 2004). The third main concept discussed in this volume, “globalization,” has received much attention in recent years precisely because it seems to challenge this fundamental ordering principle of the modern state system. Globalization proposes that exclusion by area loses its importance in “a world of flows.”

One of the surprises in our increasingly globalized world is that the attachments to territory of individuals, ethnic groups, and governments have not appeared to weaken significantly. Governments have remained vigilant about the exact demarcation of their territorial boundaries even as goods and people move ever more seamlessly across these borders. Governments have also continued to fight for territory even as their wealth and security have become increasingly disconnected from it. Indonesia, for example, spent millions of dollars fighting to retain East Timor even though this was more than they could ever hope to recoup from any offshore oil reserves. And emigrants from places like Eritrea and Ireland continue to maintain close political and economic ties with their homelands even though many of them know they will never return. Territorial boundaries may have become more permeable, and the material and strategic value of land may have become less significant, but people's attachment to particular pieces of territory does not seem to have declined.

This paradox has been the focus of this volume. In the book, we have attempted to explain how territorial attachments are constructed, why they have remained so powerful in the face of an increasingly globalized world, and what effect continuing strong attachments may have on conflict. Each of the chapters has examined a different element of the inter-relationship between territoriality, globalization, and conflict, yet one common conclusion stands out.

One of the founding images of the recent wave of globalization discourse has been that of the deterritorialized migrant. Adrift without roots in an economically integrated world, the migrant has stood as a figure for the future of us all in an era in which territory was supposed to lose its role in structuring economic and political life. In the wake of the enthusiasm this image generated, whole bodies of social theory grew up that took the experience of the migrant as the norm and used it as a basis from which to critique older theories of culture and society based on notions of territorial identification and stability (for a review, see Papastergiadis 2000). Yet as the period of early enthusiasm has passed, many social scientists have come to realize that the majority of people in the world are not on the move, and that many of those who do move do not in the course of doing so necessarily lose their feelings of attachment to their home territories (see Lyons, this volume). The shift from one position to the other has not, however, been merely an idle pendulum swing, for what the discussions surrounding issues of movement and deterritorialization have demonstrated is that the links between people and territories are complex and require examination in their own right if we are to understand how they might change in response to social forces such as globalization.

Assumptions about territory permeate legal systems. American law is no exception. Territoriality is a defining attribute of the Westphalian state, the model upon which the framers of the US Constitution based their aspirations for a new nation. Under Westphalian principles the scope of a sovereign's law corresponds to the geographic boundaries of the sovereign's territory, what Miles Kahler, in his introduction to this volume, calls “jurisdictional congruence.”

Yet it is increasingly common to assert that Westphalian territorial sovereignty is breaking down – that we are entering a borderless world in which international forces permeate the once-hard shell of the state. Globalization, many argue, is rapidly eroding the significance of territorial boundaries (for example, Ohmae 1990; Held et al. 1999). Capital, labor, goods, and ideas are said to move largely without regard for political borders, radically transforming our polities and economies. These claims are controversial and have spawned fierce debate in economics and political science. Within legal scholarship, by contrast, the domestic impacts of globalization have received less sustained attention. Yet legal rules and practices provide an important and overlooked window on the alleged impacts of globalization, particularly with regard to territoriality.

All legal systems presuppose some relationship between law and territory. I call these rules of legal spatiality. This chapter charts the evolution of legal spatiality in the United States, and offers several causal arguments about this evolution and its connections to shifts in international security and economics.

Interaction

Interaction is the exchange of value or information between two parties. While trade, mail, and diplomatic ties transmit positive value, war and other forms of armed conflict are examples of the exchange of negative value. Interaction – positive as well as negative – is determined by opportunity, motive, and identity. An interacting party needs a motive to engage in interaction, such as the desire to gain, financially or otherwise. Secondly, a transaction must be practically feasible. Finally, each party needs to have sufficient identity or coherence to be considered as an actor. In order to join the European Union and NATO, for instance, the motivation to become a member is not sufficient. Cooperation also depends on the opportunity to join as determined by the good will of the organization and the right timing. The prospective member also needs to be identified as an actor. Greenland can leave the European Union, while Occitania cannot. Likewise, negative interaction, including the use of military force, is unrealistic unless all three factors are present. Features that promote peaceful interaction may also constitute a foundation for conflict.

Various models of internal conflict are related to this three-factor model, whose origins are usually credited to Gurr (1970). In their work on interstate war, Most and Starr (1989, 23) posit that decisions to go to war require opportunity and willingness.

Introduction

In a world of finite resources, states occasionally use or threaten force to coerce what they cannot obtain more expediently through bargain or barter. Historically, territory has been a particularly potent source of interstate friction (Vasquez 1993). Land, and the resources in and under territory, traditionally served as the basis for sovereign wealth and power. Big states were naturally stronger, and often attempted to co-opt their smaller neighbors (Fazal 2002; Alesina and Spolaore 2005; Lake and O'Mahony 2004). Warfare ensued as sovereigns sought to take or hold territory, or to acquire or retain resources and populations tied to the soil. A variety of arguments and anecdotes suggest ways in which the incentives to compete over territory have diminished among advanced industrialized economies. Two main forces characterize economic changes thought to be associated with a decline in the propensity toward territorial conflict: economic development and globalization. Economic development involves specialization of labor, technological innovation, the concentration of capital, and other measures that substantially increase productivity beyond levels in traditional societies. Globalization consists of the integration of markets and the decentralization of production networks.

Students of international politics have long been interested in the role of economic development in curbing, or augmenting, the impetus to take up arms. Still, how economic processes relate to interstate conflict is as yet poorly understood. Elsewhere, I point out that contrasting claims about economic development and conflict can be reconciled by recognizing that development differentially affects competition over different “goods.”

The average size of states within the international system expanded steadily during the nineteenth century, nearly doubling between 1816 and 1876, and then contracted over the twentieth century. In previous work, we found that two key characteristics of globalization, increasing economies of scale and economic openness, as well as regime type, were important explanations for this trend in average state size (Lake and O'Mahony 2004). The rise in territorial size during the nineteenth century was, in part, the product of a growing number of large, federal democracies made possible by increasing economies of scale, while economic liberalism allowed small, unitary democracies to prosper in the twentieth century.

In this chapter, we analyze how this trend in average state size affects interstate conflict. We predict that as average state size increased in the nineteenth century, larger national territories will become more valuable, leading to more interstate territorial disputes. Conversely, as average state size declined in the twentieth century, we expect interstate conflict to decline. Testing this hypothesis at both the systemic and the regional level, we find relatively strong support for this expectation in the pattern of interstate wars and in the issues underlying those conflicts.

We first summarize our earlier investigation into the patterns and causes of average state size since 1815. The second section section develops our theory of average state size and conflict, and the third section reviews the empirical evidence. In the fourth section, we examine changes in the issues that led to interstate war.

From the Tear of the Clouds to the Verrazano

The ecological and cultural importance of the Hudson is surely not revealed by its size. Its drainage basin is about 34,000 square kilometers (km) (13,000 square miles), which is less than one percent of the United States. In contrast, the Mississippi drains about half of the area of the lower 48 states. Compared to the mighty Mississippi's length of 3,700 km, the Hudson, originating in the Adirondacks and pulsing to the sea through the Verrazano Narrows, flows over a main course of only 500 km (ca. 300 miles).

Henry Hudson and his crew first saw the mouth of the Hudson in 1609, but it wasn't until the 1870s that its origin was declared, at tiny Lake Tear of the Clouds, near Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks. The small rivers and streams flowing from Adirondack peaks over 1000 meters (m) in elevation descend to a lowland drainage usually less than 100 m above sea level. Below Troy the river is navigable to the Narrows entrance to the ocean.

The Terrane

The Hudson River drains New York, and parts of Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The basin contains three subareas: the upper Hudson from Mt. Marcy to Troy, the Mohawk from Rome to Troy, and the lower Hudson from Troy to New York Bay (we try to stick to this terminology throughout the book, but some authors have failed us).

abstract The quality of the Hudson River estuary has been negatively impacted for many years by the discharge of untreated sewage. The abatement of these discharges due to construction and upgrading of wastewater treatment plants (WTP) in the Hudson valley from the 1930s to the 1990s has significantly reduced loadings of suspended solids, oxygen demanding organics, floatables, and pathogens, with lesser reductions observed for nitrogen and phosphorus. In response, water quality conditions have improved significantly. Dissolved oxygen has increased from critically low levels to summer averages that exceed 5 mg l−1 and pollution sensitive insects and marine borers have returned to the estuary. Sanitary quality has also improved with most of the Hudson today considered to meet swimmable water quality standards. Consequently, shellfish beds and bathing beaches have been reopened in New York/New Jersey Harbor and additional beaches are being considered throughout the river. Priorities for the future include: increased capital and operations and maintenance investments for WTPs, improved capture and treatment of combined sewer overflows (CSO), and investigation of the need for nutrient removal.

Introduction

The Hudson River south of the Federal dam at Troy comprises an approximately 240 km long estuarine system that has been subjected to an enormous loading of pollutants from a variety of sources for over three hundred years. Until relatively recently, this loading included the discharge of millions of liters of untreated sewage per day.

abstract Primary productivity in the saline Hudson River estuary is strongly regulated by water residence times in the estuary. Nutrient loads and concentrations are very high, and when residence times are more than two days, production is extremely high. When water residence times are less than two days, production rates are low to moderate. Residence times are controlled both by freshwater discharge into the estuary and by tidal mixing, so residence times are longest and production is highest during neap tides when freshwater discharge is low. Freshwater discharge was generally high in the 1970s, which kept primary production low. In contrast, freshwater discharge rates were lower in the 1990s, and the estuary became hypereutrophic.

Nutrient loading per area of estuary to the saline portion of the Hudson is probably the highest for any major estuary in North America. As of the 1990s, approximately 58 percent of the nitrogen and 81 percent of the phosphorus came from wastewater effluent and other urban discharges in the New York City metropolitan area. Some 42 percent of the nitrogen and 19 percent of the phosphorus came from upriver tributary sources. For nitrogen, these tributary inputs are dominated by nonpoint sources, with atmospheric deposition from fossil fuel combustion and agricultural sources contributing equally. Human activity has probably increased nitrogen loading to the Hudson estuary twelve-fold and phosphorus loading fifty-fold or more since European settlement. Nitrogen and phosphorus loadings to the estuary have decreased somewhat since 1970 due to universal secondary treatment of dry-weather wastewater effluents and a ban on phosphates in detergents.