Settling Resistant Territorial Disputes: The Territorial Boundary Peace in Latin America

Abstract Why do some territorial disputes defy settlement? Through what mechanism might these resistant territorial disputes be settled? We propose that the answer involves three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. First, the dispute must receive attention—i.e., be (re)placed and (re)prioritized on the dyad's agenda. Second, governments need altered preferences that expand the bargaining range so they can break deadlock and pursue settlement. Finally, disputing states need third-party assistance to facilitate, locate, incentivize, and support a settlement of their protracted dispute. We test this “AAA Model” in post–World War II Latin America. To do this, we first theorize the particular form of the general model; in post–1945 Latin America, attention, altered preferences, and third-party assistance operate through the mechanisms of militarization, democratization, and mediation respectively. We then identify resistant territorial disputes and advance a novel, multimethod research design to evaluate our hypotheses—one that relies more heavily on within-case counterfactual analysis. An extensive series of these counterfactual analyses, along with a statistical analysis, produce consistent, significant support for our model. When resistant territorial disputes in post–1945 Latin America have attention, altered preferences, and third-party assistance simultaneously, they always settle; when they lack any one factor, however, settlement never occurs.