ROW Episode 37

In this episode we propose a series of steps the international community ought to take in order to eliminate boundary and territorial disputes as they often serve as triggers for violent conflict and lead to breaches of international peace.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we propose a series of steps the international community ought to take in order to eliminate boundary and territorial disputes, as they often serve as triggers for violent conflict and lead to breaches of international peace. Many wars and conflicts in the world have been sparked by and continue to fester and threaten to erupt because of competing claims to territory. In fact, there's a pretty stunning statistic that I wanted to share with you. 85 percent of the world's countries are involved in a territorial dispute with at least one other country. People have drawn maps showing in red the number of countries that are involved in at least one territorial dispute. And it's amazing. It's like almost the entire planet is involved. So it behooves us to really pay attention to solving these boundary conflicts and territorial disputes. If we did that, imagine how much we could relieve our world from the burdens of war and conflict, with everything that entails in terms of the costs in human life, human suffering, destruction of property, and all the other crises. And I think the conflict in Ukraine If nothing else, in Syria and so on, have shown us really the untenable costs of conflict. We need only consider, for instance, the fact that in the 20th century, the century before this, the biggest conflicts, including the two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War, had to do with boundary disputes that, if left unresolved, were capable of miring entire regions and countries in war and conflict. Unfortunately, our attempts to tackle this problem, which is a deep one, have been haphazard. We've had occasional successes, but we've left the bulk of the problems intact. For example, while international law has developed certain rules determining what constitutes territorial sovereignty, how masses of land or water are bounded and can be said to lie within the territory of any given state, we still find ourselves in the 21st Century with a lot of intractable boundary disputes. Think about Israel and Palestine over the Golan Heights, Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights, Israel and Palestine over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir China over Taiwan--is it part of China? Is it not part of China? Is it an independent country?-- Russia and the Ukraine, Russia and Crimea, Russia and Georgia, where we had the war a number of years ago, the fights in the South China Seas over sets of islands like the Spratley Islands, the Paracel Islands, and Scarborough Shoal, and in the East China Sea over the islands of Senkaku. And that's just to name but a few. Let's just quickly look at what are some of the important causes. Really, the biggest drivers of territorial dispute are firstly that boundaries very often were imposed by colonial or empirical powers. It's a historical problem and we had colonial, whether they were Western colonial powers or the Russian or Ottoman empires who held control over many countries and peoples. Once these empires collapsed, the Cold War basically froze these political structures as they were at the end of World War II. And then during the Cold War, the status quo was largely preserved. But once the Cold War ended, all of these ethnic and religious divisions that lay beneath the surface and were smoldering began to heat up again, and disaffected people strove to break away from their states and set up their own dominions in a quest for self determination. What did international law do? It set up this rule. It developed a doctrine called muti posidetis juris. The goal was to ensure that new states that emerged after independence would remain stable, so they would just take on the boundaries that they had at the moment of independence. The problem with this approach is that the people who emerged post colonialization had not had a say in the way their boundaries had been drawn in the first place, and so they were reluctant to accept wholesale a system of boundary demarcation agreed to among the colonial powers whose shackles they had finally managed to break. An example of a country in which the people sought self determination is the country of Somalia, which claimed parts of Ethiopia and Kenya, both of the parts that were inhabited by Somali tribes. And then, of course, this doctrine of muti posidetis juris conflicts with yet another principle of international law, which is a core principle, and that's the principle of the self determination of peoples. So you see, we haven't really come up with a system for resolving what happens to these boundaries once nations became independent, and how do we quell these eternal boundary disputes. Now, the second driver for many of these boundary conflicts is competition over access to critical natural sources like energy. Really a desire to obtain equitable access to these raw materials and critical resources on reasonable terms. Unfortunately we have failed to create a universal mechanism to tackle these historical and arbitrary demarcations of boundaries effectively. There's been no systematic effort to do essentially three really important things. The first is we need to be able to identify in a timely fashion all the flashpoints in the world resulting from such disputes. Secondly, we need to come up with a fair and consistent set of rules that can be applied methodically to resolving such disputes. You'll recall that during this series, we've often taken a very principle driven approach, that we need to first identify a set of shared ethics or universal first principles, like the principle of the oneness of nations and peoples and the principle of equity and justice. And then incorporate them into the processes and the institutions we create and adopt, in order to tackle the challenges of the 21st century. And the third thing that we have unfortunately failed to do is to create a responsible international body with the authority to make these determinations about where do the boundaries lie. In essence, our approach so far has been a reactive versus a proactive one. Now this is another topic we've covered and I think we spent an entire session on this a while back, about taking a reactive approach to problems as opposed to thinking ahead and being proactive, taking a principled approach as opposed to one based on expediency. So what we've done in this reactive approach is that we've either left the parties in a boundary dispute to voluntarily take their dispute before the International Court of Justice and await its judgment, which, if rendered, they may or may not then implement. Remember, we also had an episode in which we talked about the many ways in which our world court is broken, and therefore incapable of doing its job, which is preventing conflict. And one of the ways it was broken is that it lacked compulsory jurisdiction, that nation states got to voluntarily submit to its jurisdiction or not. And then even when the court renders a judgment, we talked about the fact that there was no means of enforcing it. It's up to the goodwill of these nations who've broken the law in the first place to then abide by judgments of the court. It's really child's play and doesn't make much sense. The second thing that happens, is that the dispute takes a turn for the worse. The nations don't go before the court, the dispute takes a turn for the worse, and then it ends up in conflict and violence. Then the international community, in the last second, once this thing has escalated and blown out of all proportion, has to get involved and take some action. Now, there are flaws in both of these approaches. Both approaches leave a lot to chance, and they don't guarantee an effective, efficient, and systematic way of resolving boundary disputes in an equitable and timely manner. The flaw in the first approach, where we leave it up to countries to say,"Yes. We'll go before the International Court of Justice and voluntarily submit to its jurisdiction," is risky because you're depending on the parties' goodwill. And it requires them to do two things. First of all, to submit to the jurisdiction of the court, and secondly, to abide by its judgment. Now, we have had some successful referrals of boundary disputes to the court. For instance, in 1991, Bahrain and Qatar agreed to submit a long standing series of disputes to the world court. These disputes had almost led to war in 1986, but fortunately the court resolved them in March 2001. So that's one success story. Another success story is a dispute between Belgium and the Netherlands over certain border plots surrounding a particular Belgian commune and a Dutch commune, and the court resolved the dispute in favor of Belgium and the parties accepted the decision. And there are a few others. Some of these disputes, interestingly, have been resolved by mediation or arbitration at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which is in The Hague, in the Netherlands. For instance, the Eritrea Ethiopia War finally ended when the parties agreed to implement the 2002 ruling of the Eritrea Ethiopia Boundary Commission that was established under the auspices of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. And Australia and East Timor, which had longstanding maritime boundary disputes between them, finally had these resolved. They were willing to submit to the jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and in 2018, there was finally an agreement after mediation under which East Timor basically will receive at least 70 percent of the largest oil field in the disputed boundaries, an oil field called Greater Sunrise. Meanwhile, we have a lot of unresolved conflicts that we listed at the beginning of this episode that I won't repeat again, like Indian Pakistan and the Golan Heights and so on. Now the flaw in the second approach, which is to stand back and just let countries duke it out and see what happens, usually ending in conflict, is that these things fester and then they do break out into conflict and violence. Sometimes the international community decides to take action to ameliorate the situation, and other times it decides to idly stand by. An interesting example, some of you may not know that the dispute between Iraq and Kuwait,--you remember when Iraq illegally tried to annex Kuwait and invaded it in August 1990-- this dispute had existed since the end of the First World War when Britain divided Kuwait and Iraq into separate emirates. Iraq never recognized Kuwait's independence. This was an arbitrary demarcation of boundaries by colonial power as far as they were concerned. And indeed in the 1960s, the UK sent troops to Kuwait to prevent its annexation by Iraq. I think few of us know this history. In 1990 almost 30 years later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, it was yet another attempt by Iraq to say,"Hey! We don't accept the borders between us and Kuwait. Kuwait is part of Iraq." And then you'll remember that the world cobbled together a coalition of forces from 28 countries, led by the U.S., but under the auspices of the Security Council, to oust Iraq from Kuwait. And then after all these years, since the end of the First World War, the Security Council, acting way too late, created a Boundary Commission for Iraq and Kuwait to resolve the dispute. Iraq stopped participating in 1992, but finally in 1994 they agreed under the pressure of sanctions and other pressures to abide by the decision of this commission. You can see how hodgepodge the system is around the world in terms of resolving boundary disputes. Therefore, it's no big surprise that we have so many of them and that 85 percent of countries are involved in at least one territorial conflict with at least one other country, which is really a stunning statistic In addition to failure to establish a proper viable global system for resolving global disputes that is systematic, methodical, applies certain principles that we're all aware of and that apply equally and fairly across the board to everyone and even handedly apply to them, we've also failed to create a system that ensures that all nations have equitable access to critical natural resources, and raw materials on reasonable terms, like sources of energy. We can see how much trouble and conflict that has created. Now, the trouble with both of these triggers, whether it's historical demarcation of boundaries by colonial or imperial powers, or whether it is a desire to lock up access to critical resources, they're both compounded by the fact that many nations involved in boundary disputes are nuclear weapons states. They own nuclear weapons and therefore the risk of us entering into a nuclear war either accidentally or deliberately goes up exponentially. Honestly, the risk is way too high. We have to resolve this problem, not just to cut down on getting 85 percent of countries in the world out of territorial disputes and get them to reallocate their energy and resources to other more constructive endeavors, but also because of the risk to the entire world of a nuclear war. Honestly, it would suffice for just one nuclear power to be involved in such a territorial dispute because of the risks. And we've seen this. We need to be learning from what we're seeing going on right now in Ukraine. One of the main reasons why the West has actually kept out of Ukraine, so we read, is that they were afraid by the threat by Russia that she might use nuclear weapons and they didn't want to get themselves embroiled in a direct conflict with Russia with the very real danger that it would escalate even accidentally and unwittingly into a nuclear war that would undoubtedly take over the whole world. We also know,--and I want to repeat this, I said this in one of the previous episodes, but it bears repeating-- that the risk of even a limited nuclear war, even if it's limited geographically or limited in time, is just untenable. Studies show that if such a very short, brief nuclear war in a very small part of the world were to take place, it would result in 10 years of no crops around the world, 10 years of no summers, leading in no crops, leading into mass starvation of about 2 billion people around the world. That is a quarter of the world's population or more. That's a pretty horrific statistic right there. Okay, so once we recognize and accept the fundamental reasons for the problems, we can now move forward towards crafting a viable solution, right? And because the system we have, this reactive system, doesn't work and is unfair. So here are some proposals about what we could do. These are proposals that I actually came up with about, oh gosh 15, 16 years ago when I wrote my first book in this area of global governance called Collective Security Within Reach, and I've been talking about it ever since. But I think now with COVID, everything that the world has gone through, especially with Ukraine and Syria and Yemen and Tigray and Ethiopia and on, all these huge conflicts around the world where boundaries are involved, Sudan and South Sudan and Eritrea and Ethiopia and on, hopefully, we'll be more receptive to some of these proposals, or at least start to think about them and get the creative juices flowing. There are a few steps that I propose What if we were to set up an International Boundary Commission, basically a permanent boundary commission, whose sole task will be to examine closely all conflicting territorial and irredentist claims. That means claims where people are seeking restoration of territories that formerly belonged to them. Nations and people should be encouraged to submit all their claims to this commission, the International Boundary Commission, for it to examine and all the relevant evidence. And then let it issue a recommendation that will then lead to a binding decision and I'll tell you how we get there. So the commission would be tasked with regularly monitoring and identifying potential trouble spots early on. To help it with this, the network of regional early warning agency that we proposed in episode 21 of this Reimagining Our World series should regularly apprise the commission of festering problems within their region. In that episode, we talked about the need to establish an international intelligence and monitoring agency with regional offices that would have early warning stations that would then feed all this early warning to the international body. And that international body, the International Intelligence and Monitoring Agency, would then communicate with the International Boundary Commission and say,"Hey, these are flashpoints. We need to resolve these problems." The commission should be given the power to request and, if necessary, compel the parties to submit their disputes for resolution. So none of this, I get to choose whether I want to come or not. And the commission, in discharging its work, will solicit input from all parties involved and study the geography, history, and demography of the regions. That's step one. Step two is that we, the international community, need to craft a body of clearly articulated principles and rules, subject to advanced agreement by the international community, that will be applied by the commission in a fair, consistent, and systematic manner to all boundary disputes, no matter where they arise. This is the principle driven approach in action when it comes to boundary disputes. Right now, the World Court applies a very broad and vague mandate to apply certain sources of law that are set out in Article 38 of the Statute of the Court that include international conventions, international customary law, and so on. The breadth and generality of these sources of law require the court to sift through a morass of rules and principles every time it decides a case, including a boundary dispute, to decide which of these rules most appropriately applies to this case. What we end up with is very often the court will apply different combinations of rules and principles, even when it's dealing with boundary cases. By contrast, giving the International Boundary Commission a specific set of rules and principles that are relevant to boundary disputes alone will facilitate their work and ensure that these rules and principles are applied equally across the board. What happens here is you build trust, and countries that are more likely to submit more eagerly and willingly and quickly their disputes to the commission, believing they'll be treated fairly and held to the same standard as any other nation. Step three. The Commission now carefully and dispassionately considers all the claims before it. And we're fortunate, we live in an information age, so there's a wealth of information that they can also research about historical facts, about how the boundaries came to be created, about the people who lived in these spaces before, their relationships with each other. But that's not enough. They need to also take into account other vital factors. Like what? Like the geography of the region, including mountain ranges, rivers, oceans, bodies of water. Geological considerations, like the existence of raw materials, since that's such a driver in boundary conflicts, and valuable resources like gold, diamonds, oil, and timber. The economic underpinnings of each region, like land cultivation, industry, or mining. International transportation routes, like pipelines, roads, railways, and ports. And the ethnic composition of the people and their cultures, including their languages, religions, and other cultural characteristics. And after considering all of this, they should come up with a reasoned recommendation, proposing a new demarcation of the applicable boundaries and explaining their basis for their recommendation. Then we get to step four, which is once the Commission has made these recommendations, the world's leaders should consider them and approve the Commission's recommendations, and then incorporate them and enshrine them in a new global treaty called an International Boundary Treaty. And this treaty has to be agreed on by all nations. You can't have some people in, some out, because as we've seen in our world that is so inextricably interconnected and interdependent, that doesn't work when you have topics where the stakes are so high for the security of the planet. Now, over time, as new disputes arise, step five kicks in. The Commission has to be tasked with the responsibility and the authority to consider new disputes. Every year, they should invite a submission of new disputes for their consideration. And in addition, in doing this, should rely on the alerts of the early warning system that we talked about. And once they consider this, every five years, they can publish an annex to the International Boundary Treaty with all their new recommendations and decisions. The sixth step is to ensure that all of these decisions that are now incorporated in this boundary treaty are enforceable, because there's no point in having laws and decisions on the books, as we very well know, if there's no mechanism for enforcement. So first of all, we have to empower the world executive, whoever it is, whether it's today the Security Council or in the future an executive authority created in the manner that we've been talking about in this series. Empowered to intervene, and if necessary using a military force, be they regional forces or the international standing army that we've also talked about at length. And the violation of this treaty should be considered a breach of the peace under the current mandate of the Security Council. Under breaches of the peace or threats to the peace or acts of aggression, it gets to act and use military force. So this should be regarded as a breach of the peace if one nation violates the International Boundary Treaty. And in general, this agreement would be enforced using the system of collective security that we talked about at length in episode 23 of this series, and then demonstrated how it might have averted the war in Ukraine in episode 29 of this series. If you haven't had a chance to watch those, I warmly recommend that you go and do that. Now, the final Step seven is we need to also address the second driver of boundary conflicts, the second biggest driver, which is the desire of countries to access energy and other critical natural resources on equitable terms and on reasonable terms. We again talked at length about the idea of creating a global energy agency starting in the field of energy that can then be expanded to include other raw materials that was in episode 34-- because this is a really a critical factor. I firmly believe that if we did nothing else, if we were to establish this global energy authority or agency and pool in its hands all the management and control of certain key resources, including energy resources, we would see the number of boundary conflicts plummet. And we could then, again, divert our energies and reallocate them to resolving some of the really dire problems we have in the world, including climate change, adaptation, mitigation, and so on. An example of a dispute, by the way, that could have been avoided taking these measures that we talked about is the one that arose between Libya and Chad over the Ozu Strip, which was a purported source of uranium in northern Chad. The dispute was finally submitted to the court by both countries in 1990 and the court found in favor of Chad, but if we had pooled these resources in the hands of a supranational energy authority then it would never have arisen in the first place. So one of the interesting things I hope you've noticed about all of these pieces that we've talked about is that they're like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, right? A boundary commission and a boundary treaty here in episode 37 is one piece. An international intelligence and monitoring agency with regional warning units is another jigsaw piece discussed in episode 21. A supranational agency for pooling and ensuring equitable access to critical resources like energy in Episode 34 is yet another piece of the jigsaw puzzle. And a viable system of collective security, including the creation of an international standing force, episode 23, is yet another piece. So you see how we've been building, we've been reimagining our world and imagining each piece of the jigsaw puzzle separately, and as we start to put them together, a picture of where the world might be headed, what we could do, choices we could make to have the world be a more peaceful and a more uplifting place and a more secure place where we can all focus on building our individual and collective potential, that picture now becomes evident. If you guys are interested in what you've heard today and want to get more, remember a lot of what we talked about, or see it in writing, or delve into further details, feel free to pick up a copy of Collective Security Within Reach on Amazon. I wrote it a number of years ago, but the ideas in it, I think, are really great are even more valid and important today than they were back in 2008 when it first came out. Okay I think I've covered what I wanted to in today's episode. I hope that you have found it interesting. I'm just quickly going to go up here and see This commenter says, we must revolutionize the mind to solve humanity's problems. You're absolutely right. We have to start with conceiving and believing that our world can be different. It's not enough to conceive. One of my favorite quotes is what a man can conceive and believe he can achieve or what a woman can conceive and believe she can achieve. So it's conceiving, but then we have to believe it before we achieve it. Very often we think,"Oh, I'll conceive it and then I'll see whether I believe it. We'll see if it happens and then I'll believe it." That is not the nature of faith and that is not the nature of creative energy that actually is capable of building something affirmative. You've got to be able to envision it and absolutely believe it in your gut, in your mind, because it's only then that we put wholehearted energy and indefatigable commitment into building things. Yes, thank you very much. Okay. Take care and thank you very much for joining me, whether here live or on YouTube. Bye for now. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.