Prominent conflicts such as the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir and the conflict on the Korean Peninsula highlight the need for peaceful solutions to violent territorial disputes. Although the effectiveness of negotiated legal solutions to such conflicts is often questioned, a new Stanford study suggests that treaties that resolve territorial conflicts “work”— in the sense that they are associated with a large reduction in the probability of subsequent conflict.

The study by Kenneth A. Schultz, associate professor of political science, and Jennifer Jones, research fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN), examined 141 pairs of states (dyads) that experienced at least one militarized territorial conflict between 1816 and 2001. Two-thirds (94) of these dyads made at least one legal commitment to resolve the territorial conflict. Two-thirds of those treaties “worked”; they were never followed by militarized conflict over the territory addressed in the agreement. A multiple regression analysis revealed that a legally binding agreement on territory is associated with a roughly 70 percent reduction in the probability of a subsequent militarized conflict.

Realist accounts of international relations predict that such treaties would work in preventing violence insofar as they allocate disputed territory in accordance with the prevailing balance of power between the affected states. Schultz and Jones’s study reveals that this “distributional” factor alone does not account for the reduced likelihood of subsequent militarized conflict. Some other variables must be at play in creating the “treaty effect."

The study accordingly examined whether the existence of a territorial treaty could itself constrain states from resorting to force to revise the agreement. In this view, the treaty effect stems from the unwillingness of the states involved to incur the costs — such as external sanctions or domestic outrage — that would stem from breaking a previously agreed-upon arrangement. Although tests indirectly support this hypothesis, the more frequent violation of simple nonaggression pacts suggests that treaties are not major constraints on state behavior. More research is necessary to determine exactly what types of salient constraints treaties place on states.

A third explanation for the treaty effect considers the domestic political costs of surrendering a state’s legal claim to territory allocated to the other party under a treaty when the claim itself is valuable, e.g., the claim to ownership over a whole piece of territory, as in Kashmir, or the claim to territory based on religious rights, as in Israel. In this view, a state would be reluctant to sign a treaty when the value of the claim to the disputed territory is particularly high. Treaties, then, serve as screening mechanisms — only those states that place a relatively low value on a claim to disputed territory will sign treaties. In this view, the treaty effect arises because states enter into treaties only when they do not want to keep fighting over disputed territory, rather than because of the inherent constraints of the treaty itself.

Although the results of the study are consistent with the view that territorial treaties work because they serve as screening mechanisms, the evidence remains unclear. There is no direct evidence that states employ a claimsbased rationale when declining to sign a treaty. Schultz and Jones are, however, working on creative ways to observe the role of this rationale for the treaty effect and expect future results to be more specific.