Territorial Claims

This article explains why the presence of coethnics across a border sometimes leads governments to treat that land as part of the homeland—and why it often does not. The key argument is that variation hinges on whether regimes rely on ethnic logics to secure domestic legitimacy. When a regime uses shared ethnicity to win support, ethnicity becomes more politically salient, cross-border coethnic populations become socially meaningful, and claims to lost territory as part of the homeland are more likely to persist.

This study investigates how state capacity supports autocrats during elections by focusing on territorial control through the state apparatus.

Territorial boundary disputes sometimes appear insoluble. To explain this phenomenon, the author introduces a new model requiring three simultaneous elements to achieve resolution.