Incommensurable Territory: Moral Image Concerns and Intangibly Valued Territory

• In Event: Negotiating Boundaries in IR

Abstract

Intangibly valued territory is viewed as particularly susceptible to intractable disputes. Most scholarship attributes this finding to territorial indivisibility, but fails to explain the incommensurability puzzle: Why are peaceful allocation mechanisms, such as side payments, unable to circumvent indivisibility? I propose moral image concerns as an explanation. When territory is intangibly valued, individuals adopt tough bargaining postures to signal their commitment to the morals embodied by the territory. Individuals reject peaceful allocation mechanisms to avoid looking like they are “selling out” their morals. When embedded into a bargaining model of war, such preferences cause bargaining breakdown. Moral image concerns parsimoniously explain numerous additional empirical findings. Most notably, indivisibility arises endogenously from moral image concerns, suggesting that indivisibility is epiphenomenal to conflict, and narratives affect behavior, providing microfoundations for constructivist theories. I substantiate the theory with survey experiments in China and Israel and a re-examination of existing empirical findings.

Author

• Fin Bauer, Princeton University