Territorial Contenders in World Politics

• Published date: 01 February 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002719847742
• Date: 01 February 2020
• Author: Charles Crabtree,Douglas Lemke
• Subject Matter: Data Set Feature

Data Set Feature

Territorial Contenders

in World Politics

Douglas Lemke

1

, and Charles Crabtree

2

Abstract

Territorial contenders are political entities that control territory but differ from

sovereign states in that they lack diplomatic recognition as legal members of the

international system. One consequence of this difference is that international rela-

tions data sets have historically excluded information about them. And yet, as evi-

denced by the Islamic State’s impact on politics in the Middle East and beyond,

territorial contendersare important actors in the international system. In thisarticle,

we introduce a new dataset of territorial contenders, compare territorialcontenders

to other categories of territorial nonstate actors, explore how the presence of

territorial contenders affects the probabilities of civil war and state failure, illustrate

the conditions under which territorial contenders are more likely to emerge, and

discuss a series of studies now possible given the existence of this new data set.

Keywords

internal armed conflict, legitimacy, separatism, capabilities

In early 2014, militants captured territory in Western Iraq and Eastern Syria and

established the Islamic State. This new government and “state” did not enjoy dip-

lomatic recognition as the legitimate authority over that area, rendering the Islamic

State a territorial contender rather than a sovereign state. Territorial c ontenders

1

Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

2

Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Douglas Lemke, Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, 205 Pond Lab, University

Park, PA 16802, USA.

Email: dwl14@psu.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(2-3) 518-544

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022002719847742

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resemble sovereign states by exercising exclusive control of territory and governing

the accompanying populations, they usually possess military forces and extract

resources from their population and territory. But they differ from sovereign states

in a vital way—they lack diplomatic recognition by the rest of the international

community and, thus, do not enjoy the benefits of sovereign statehood. As the

Islamic State example suggests, territorial contenders are often associated with civil

war and state failure. The example also suggests that territorial contenders are state

makers. Less obviously, territorial contenders are survival-oriented actors compet-

ing within an anarchic international system. This makes them relevant for evaluating

theories about international relations (IR).

When a territorial contender emerges, the sovereign state recognized as the

authority for that territory faces a serious problem. A domestic competitor has

excluded it from some of its territory, thus denying it that area’s resources and

demonstrating the sovereign state does not control all of its national area. This is a

dire threat to the sovereign state’s legitimacy and capacity. Indeed, territorial

contenders are the main threat to many sovereign states and thus are consequential

actors in the international system. And yet, given little previous systematic data

about them, they remain relatively unstudied. The role territorial contenders play

in civil wars, state failure, state making, and within IR generally is largely

unknown.

Motivated by a desire to investigate the role of territorial contenders in civil

wars, state failure, state making, and IR more broadly, the first author has col-

lected a new data set characterizing 187 territorial contenders within the borders

of sixty-two sovereign states. In this article, we introduce this new data set about

territorial contenders. The category of territorial contenders subsumes a variety of

territorial nonstate actors, so we provide a conceptual definition of territorial

contenders and also compare the general class of territorial contenders with spe-

cific subsets such as de facto states and territorial rebel groups. We demonstrate

that, absent a theory specific to a subset, it is preferable to study the general

category of territorial contenders.

After introducing the new data set and comparing territorial contenders to subsets

of nonstate actors, we present several empirical analyses. We show that the presence

of territorial contenders is a strong correlate of the on set and incidence of both civil

war and state failure. The Islamic State appears to be one example of a general

pattern. We then investigate the emergence of territorial contenders, finding that

interactions between past territorial contenders and sovereign states are the most

substantively important factor in determining how many subsequent territorial

contenders emerge. After presenting and discussing the empirical results, we

describe a number of research projects now possible given these new data and,

thus, return to questions about how careful consideration of territorial contenders

might expand what we know about civil war, state failure, state making, and IR

theory more broadly.

Lemke and Crabtree 519