Throughout history, the defense of or desire for territory has led to recurrent conflict and invariably resulted in war. Territorial disputes often involve areas with strategic or economic value and are more likely to be recurrent, have higher fatalities if war occurs, and require a greater investment of military resources than other types of dispute. Territorial disputes are also a major source of friction between states and a core concern for scholars studying conflict and peace.
A number of data sets are available for studying territorial disputes. The most prominent is the Correlates of War Project Militarized Dispute dataset. It includes conflicts where territorial issues are a primary issue for at least one of the participants and covers the 1919-2003 period. However, a limitation of this dataset is that it focuses on conflict events meeting a certain threshold of severity, which may exclude a large proportion of territorial disputes without the use or threat of force.
It is important to distinguish between the different dimensions of territorial dispute. There is a tendency in the literature to treat all territorial disputes as equal, but there are many kinds of disputes involving different kinds of land: