Averting Armed International Conflicts Through State-to-State Territorial Transfers

This study examines how changes in land's ownership (i.e., territorial transfers) influence the prospects of future armed conflict between countries gaining and losing land. The losing country is motivated by the value of the lost land, while the winner is motivated by the value of additional land it desires but which the loser still controls. Relative power and transfer process condition whether these motivations are turned into the post-transfer use of force. Three basic processes of how the land changed hands are considered: peaceful, overwhelming victory, and violent (but short of an overwhelming victory). The findings show that both peaceful and overwhelming victory transfers are significantly better in terms of minimizing the chances of post-transfer conflict than are their violent counterparts and that intangible factors such as disputed land's ethnic value play less of a role in conflict onset for both parties than do tangible factors such as disputed land's strategic and economic value.