Quick, name the U.S. government's two territorial disputes. The first-Guantánamo base in Cuba, leased from Cuba for a small rent since 1903 but claimed back by Fidel Castro-isn't too hard. But few will know the other, Navassa Island, an uninhabited outcrop of rock between Jamaica and Haiti that the latter claims. A useful and interesting book, Border and Territorial Disputes covers problems as obscure as Navassa Island and as famed as the Iraqi claim on Kuwait. Its accounts are both reliable and objective.
Africa hosts the most conflicts, twenty, followed by Europe with nineteen, East Asia with seventeen, the Americas with fifteen, and the Middle East with twelve. Antarctica counts as one. China would appear to be the country with the most disputes, seven, a fact of possibly great future significance. Not surprisingly, Europe has enjoyed a recent boom in border conflicts, so the pages devoted to its problems have doubled since the second edition appeared in 1987. The Arab-Israeli conflicts (note the plural) fills by far the most pages, followed by ex-Yugoslavia, the Kurile Islands, and the ex-Soviet Union. Inexplicably, claims to the whole of a territory (as opposed to just part of it) tend to get neglected. Thus, both the Syrian claim to Lebanon and the Chinese claim to Hong Kong are absent.
Now, if only Gale Research (and the Longman Group in Great Britain, the original publisher) priced books less extravagantly, individual researchers could own this wonderful compendium and make full use of it.
