Timothy Less is the Senior Advisor for Geopolitics at the Centre for Risk Studies at the Judge Business School and convenes the study group in geopolitical risk analysis at the Centre for Geopolitics of the University of Cambridge. 

With Russia’s annexation of the four oblasts in eastern Ukraine, the world has entered a new age of secession. For better or worse, Russia has established a new fact on the ground: that the Russian-speaking provinces in the Donbas are now Russian rather than Ukrainian, a fact that can only be revised in the unlikely event that the Ukrainian army breaks through one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world and expels the more powerful Russian forces.

Ukraine: the conflict that arguably ushered in a new era of secession

Russia’s revision of its boundary with Ukraine is unlikely to be a one-off event. The redrawing of international borders is a longstanding geopolitical tool of the great powers, which ultimately get to decide where borders lie. Broadly, each power wants to organize the map in a way that promotes its interests and beliefs, if necessary, at the expense of their opponents, and the most powerful actor in the international system gets to align borders most closely with its particular interests.

Moreover, the use of border adjustments as a geopolitical tool increases as competition among the dominant powers intensifies. To the extent the leading powers have organized the world in their own interests, so challenger powers inevitably want to reconfigure the map to their advantage; and, to the extent they can get away with it, they do. Seemingly isolated border shocks can be the signifier of an impending clash between the great powers. When this happens, multiple borders can change at once.

As the world enters an era of deepening geopolitical competition, annexations, secessions, and other kinds of territorial revisionism are likely to become features of the international system, for which Ukraine is a harbinger. Challenger states such as China, Russia, and Türkiye are already trying to adjust borders on their periphery and, further afield, small nations are trying to co-opt these states to change their own borders, in the face of resistance from the United States that wants to uphold the existing international territorial settlement. If precedent is any guide, a more radical shake-up of borders may be approaching.

 

Geopolitical Competition and Borders

Adjustments to international borders are an important means by which the dominant powers uphold and advance their geopolitical interests, and each power wants to organize the map in a way that provides it with the greatest advantage. The most important of these concerns is security, for which the configuration of international borders is a critical determinant. At home, great powers seek both to expand their own frontiers, and to establish buffers on their borders, involving independence for friendly nations and the denial of independence to unfriendly ones who must remain stateless minorities.

In relation to their great power rivals, the opposite logic applies. The leading powers have an interest in shrinking their rivals and encircling them with local opponents, which in turn denies the rival a sphere of influence, again involving the principle of favorable treatment for friendly nations and its denial to unfriendly ones.

Exceptions to this pattern are possible if rival powers reach a détente and agree not to change borders to their own advantage, even if this bestows advantage on their opponent. This was the case during the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to freeze borders in Europe where they faced each other off to prevent a direct conflict that could lead to nuclear war. Great powers are also often constrained by the presence of violent separatist groups at home, which incline them to be cautious in promoting separatism abroad.

The leading powers also seek to configure borders in ways that benefit them economically. At times, that has meant asserting direct ownership over a valuable economic asset such as a natural resource, a port or a supply line, by incorporating it into the borders of the state itself. Such considerations drove the process of European expansion in the early-modern era, and the absorption of territory in Africa, Asia, and South America into globalized imperial structures.

In the post-imperial world, individual powers have sought to configure borders in ways that ensure valuable economic assets are owned by favored groups which make that asset available to the powers themselves, and are denied to hostile groups which would make the asset available to their rivals. The United States could not accept Soviet-backed Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait’s oil fields in 1990, just as it cannot accept China’s seizure of Taiwan’s microchip factories today. Nor do the great powers want local conflicts over borders to interrupt crucial supply lines and often act to shut down such disputes.

The interests of the leading powers in rearranging borders are reinforced by their beliefs and moral convictions that have shifted over time. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the great powers’ approach to questions of borders was guided by ideas of national sovereignty, most notably to justify the breakup of the European land empires after World War I. In the postwar period, concepts of national liberation provided moral grounds for decolonization and the emergence of dozens of new states in Africa and Asia.

More recently, the approach to questions of borders has been shaped in the West by an aversion to nationalism and an emphasis on human rights. The United States justified the independence of Kosovo, and to some extent also that of Timor-Leste and South Sudan, as the means to end the suffering of a minority group at the hands of an oppressive majority. In Europe, integrationists have justified the steady dissolving of national borders between EU members not just as a practical but also as a moral endeavor.

This combination of security, economic, and ideological motive are crystalized at any one time into a set of norms that both justify the particular configuration of borders that the dominant powers have forged and, at least in theory, set the rules for the recognition of any new states. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the great powers established norms around sovereignty, political independence and the self-determination of nations, all of which feature in the 1945 UN charter.

These were supplanted in the postwar period by the norm of territorial integrity, which again found its way into the UN charter as well as other documents such as the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Former colonies of European empires were recognized but only within their existing administrative boundaries, denying ethnic and tribal groups such as the Igbo of Biafra the right to independence from Nigeria. More recently, the United States has pushed the right of remedial secession as a new international norm that challenges the earlier norm of territorial integrity, which others, such as Russia, have subsequently endorsed to justify border changes in the former Soviet Union.

If the approach of individual great powers to questions of borders is governed mainly by their rivalries with other leading powers, they are also attentive to the demands of numerous smaller nations trying to establish their independence. Minority groups, from Basques and Catalans in Spain to Bosnia’s Serbs, Abkhazians and Ossetians and the Sahrawis of Western Sahara, continually cajole the dominant powers into supporting their cause and exploit every opportunity, including conflicts between the great powers, to try and advance their national goals.

The demands of these small nations provide the means by which leading powers can truncate or break up their rivals. Lawrence of Arabia famously stirred up Arab nationalism as a means to destroy the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and the United States backed the various national groups seeking independence from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War. Conversely, majority groups which want to preserve existing borders, from the Spanish and the Bosniaks, to Georgians and Moroccans, continually lobby the great powers to deny their local separatists independence.

When borders do change, they generally fit into one of several established patterns. Some are harbingers, which can initially seem like isolated cases. Examples include Greece’s independence from the Ottomans in 1829, Prussia’s annexation of Danish Holstein in 1867, the independence of Bulgaria and Romania in 1878, Japan’s seizure of southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands from Russia in 1905, and the Soviet Union’s absorption of Belarus, Ukraine, and Trans-Caucasia in 1922.

In reality, these were not isolated cases but the first in a cycle of border adjustments that fully realized itself in time, reflecting a nascent shift in the international balance of power and intensifying great power competition. The emergence of proto-states in the Balkans in the nineteenth century represented a milestone in the demise of the Ottoman Empire, which would eventually fragment into multiple smaller states. Prussia’s gain in Denmark foretold the rise of Germany and its eventual reorganization of the map of Europe. Japan’s territorial acquisitions in Asia and that of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe similarly marked their rise as great powers.

Other border changes come in clusters affecting multiple states, invariably against the backdrop of a clash between the great powers, which have largely defined the map as it exists today. World War I produced a proliferation of new states in Eastern Europe as Germany forced a defeated Russia to recognize the independence of a swathe of nations—from the Finns and Estonians to the Ukrainians—to buffer itself against the residual threat from Moscow. Britain, France, and the United States then divided the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires along ethno-national lines, carved up Germany and Hungary, and established the multiethnic Yugoslavia as a buffer against German and Hungarian revanchism.

This was followed by another round of mass border changes in the decade around World War II. Germany initially redrew borders to its own advantage, before being carved up by the Allies once again. The Soviet Union annexed the Baltic States, Moldova, eastern Poland, the Karelia region of Finland, and eventually also seized the German enclave of Königsberg, now Kaliningrad. In Asia, Japan’s initial efforts to expand its territory backfired, resulting in the Soviet Union’s re-annexation of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. As a coda to the war in Europe, Israel was carved out of the British mandate in Palestine as a solution to the problem of where to relocate Europe’s traumatized Jewish population.

The Cold War brought a further profusion of border changes as the superpowers sought to knock the UK and France out of the ranks of the great powers and achieve hegemony for themselves by promoting decolonization in Africa and Asia. Having removed the formal imperial power, the U.S. and USSR exploited the subsequent power vacuum to establish their influence in newly independent states, often pitching CIA-backed dictators against KGB-backed Marxist rebels.

The end of the Cold War then saw a further massive reorganization of the map as a victorious U.S. indulged its monopoly on power to rearrange borders in Eastern Europe in its own interests. It cut its former Soviet opponent down to size by supporting the demands for independence of Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and the peoples of the Caucasus. It supported the quest for independence by the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, leading to its eventual collapse. The United States also allowed two new allies, the Czechs and Slovaks, to divorce and permitted its traditional ally West Germany to absorb East Germany.

The post-Cold War period exhibited another pattern of border changes still, that is, the independence of states that can genuinely be seen as isolated cases, at least from today’s perspective. These include the independence of Eritrea from Ethiopia in 1993, Timor-Leste from Indonesia in 2003, Kosovo from Serbia in 2008, and South Sudan in 2011, all of which benefitted from American sponsorship. To these can be added informal examples. The Iraqi Kurds gained a de facto independence with the expulsion of Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1990, which they maintain to this day.

However, even these cases cannot be separated from the underlying power relations that prevailed during this period, in which a hegemonic America could bestow independence on these peoples without decisive pushback from the other powers. With the benefit of hindsight, these cases may yet be viewed as a prelude to the period that followed, in which Washington’s great power rivals gained in strength and reacted to the precedent of redrawing borders with a similar effort to reconfigure the map to their advantage.

 

Contested Borders Today

If so, then the most immediate challenge to international borders is coming from Russia, a troubled and declining state that has demonstrated its willingness to revise the territorial settlement imposed by the United States in the former Soviet space. In the main, Russia is guided by fears for its security, in particular moves by the newly independent states on its border to join the American camp, risking Russia’s encirclement and eventual attack by NATO for which revising borders helps in two main ways.

The first is to serve as deterrence to states that draw close to the United States, starting with Georgia which lost the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia after Russia’s invasion in 2008, as the price for seeking membership of NATO. And the second is to establish new strategic buffers to protect Russia against American encroachment, ideally by drawing neighboring states such as Ukraine into a closer relationship with Russia but, if necessary, by partitioning them and establishing the more compliant part of the country as a strategic buffer.

In some measure, Russia’s approach to borders is also guided by its concern for the welfare of ethnic Russians stranded after the collapse of the Soviet Union in Ukraine, the Baltic States, Moldova, and parts of Central Asia, who have been subject to processes of coercive assimilation by other peoples, determined to build their newly independent states in their own exclusive identity. If these diasporas cannot be allowed to live freely as Russians abroad—as Russia appears to believe—then the solution to their predicament is to integrate their territories into the home state, as Russia has done in Ukraine.

A second major challenge is coming from China, which too has an interest in revising the current territorial settlement in the Far East, motivated by a desire for security from the United States, a wish to acquire valuable economic assets, and a resurgent Chinese nationalism which aims at national unification and the restoration of lost Chinese territory by adjusting borders in the region. This has been justified by a reinterpretation of the norm of territorial integrity aimed not at protecting existing borders, as the Cold War superpowers intended, but restoring China’s earlier integrity following its disintegration through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

China has taken some initial steps towards this goal. It has reincorporated the Chinese-populated territories of Macau and Hong Kong, integrating them into the Chinese state more fully than was ever agreed by international treaty. Beijing has openly contested maritime borders in the South China Sea, leading to a proliferation of artificial islands intended, literally, to create new facts on the ground. It also has its eye on previously Chinese possessions in Russia’s Far East, which it is integrating economically and colonizing demographically, pending an opportunity for the region’s eventual annexation.

Most importantly, China has also made clear its intention to integrate Taiwan, the international status of which is ambiguous but which is claimed by China to be an integral part of the Chinese state—at the latest by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, and potentially as soon as 2027 when, according to military analysts, China will have developed the physical capability to seize the island if it so chooses.

Less conspicuously, Türkiye is also pursuing a revisionist agenda which seeks to change borders in its neighborhood. Security issues play a role, mainly in Syria where Türkiye has established a semi-autonomous buffer zone. However, Türkiye’s primary motive is to acquire economic assets, particularly oil and gas, which Anatolia lacks but has been discovered in abundance in the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean. Ideology also plays a role as the country regains its strength after a century of relative weakness, and with it a resurgent nationalism that seeks to unify the Turkish nation and establish a sphere of influence in a region where Türkiye dwarfs its closest neighbors.

To this end, Ankara has staked a claim to various small islands close to the Turkish mainland that were awarded to Greece after World War I, involving occasional confrontations with the Greek navy over the years. In 2019, Türkiye also laid claim to an exclusive economic zone in a corridor of sea connecting the country to Libya, running close to islands such as Crete and Rhodes, in disregard of Greece’s recognized sovereignty over these waters.

However, Türkiye’s most immediate challenge to borders is in Cyprus, where Ankara has withdrawn its one-time support for the island’s unification and now supports a ‘two-state’ solution, involving international recognition of Northern Cyprus’ independence and its steady integration into Türkiye itself. To this end, Ankara has taken decisive steps to assert its sovereignty over the territory, increasing its economic and military presence and settling it with Turks from the mainland, while sending ships into Northern Cyprus’ waters to explore for oil and gas.

Meanwhile, the EU is actively pursuing the goal of enlargement into Eastern Europe, with the aim of expanding its borders to encompass the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Moldova, and sometimes also Armenia and Georgia, plus the six countries in the Western Balkans—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia—as a means to roll back the influence of Russia, China, and Türkiye in the remaining unintegrated parts of the region, and establish the EU as a great power in its own right.

This has been combined with persistent efforts by integrationists in countries in the EU’s Western European core to downgrade the independence of the EU’s members. Such efforts are justified by the need to deepen the EU as the precondition for widening it, with an immediate focus on centralizing decisionmaking over foreign and security policy. Superficially, such moves are consistent with the norm of territorial integrity since they do not involve moving borders. However, taken to their conclusion, efforts to establish a European superstate amount de facto to the dissolution of once independent states whose borders cease to be international.

Further afield, smaller nations have spotted an opportunity amidst growing conflict between the great powers to try and establish their statehood—most obviously the Palestinians who want to establish an independent Palestinian state—and with some success. Ireland, Spain, Norway, and Slovenia have all recognized Palestine within its existing borders this year (although the EU as a whole has held back). For its part, Hamas is also pushing for Palestinian dominion over territory controlled by Israel, calculating that Türkiye, Russia, Iran, and other major powers will back them.

Azerbaijan is in the process of changing its borders after conquering and expelling much of its Armenian population from the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was (at least partially) controlled by Armenia until 2023. Again, the country has responded to the shifting geopolitics, correctly calculating that Russia, Armenia’s traditional great power ally is distracted by events in Ukraine and that Türkiye would back Azerbaijan politically and militarily as a means to roll back Russian influence in the Caucasus and expand its own sphere of influence.

In the Balkans, the Serbs have responded to growing geopolitical competition to push their goal of establishing a unified nation state. The Bosnian Serbs have focused on Russia, which has been willing to back their goal of establishing their independence from Bosnia while Serbia proper has looked to China for help in relation to Kosovo, which Belgrade eventually wants to partition along ethnic lines, with the Serb-populated north passing to Serbia.

Within the EU, the Hungarians, who are similarly divided, have responded to the shifting geopolitics by voicing openly irredentist claims on the Hungarian-populated territories on the country’s border. This especially pertains to the Transcarpathia region in eastern Ukraine which, in the context of the country’s partition by Russia, some politicians believe is now up for grabs. In this context, Hungary is drawing closer to China and has retained pragmatic relations with Russia, while backing the Serbs, even as they push their revisionist goals.

Other national groups in Europe are also seeking to change borders, from Ireland where support is growing for the annexation of Northern Ireland, to Belgium where Flemish nationalists committed to the independence of Flanders are in the ascendent, and Spain where nationalist parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country have entered the central government. Across Europe, in defiance of the integrationists, nationalist parties are also calling for the breakup—or at least a radical loosening—of the EU, allowing its various members to reassert their former independence.

Much of this is being resisted by the United States which wants to uphold the international territorial settlement it has constructed over the last four decades and sees any changes to this settlement as a threat. The loss of Taiwan would undermine American influence in the Pacific, while the final breakup of Cyprus would galvanize Türkiye’s steady rise. The reunification of nations such as the Russians, Chinese, or Turks, or smaller groups which they favor such as the Serbs, would strengthen and encourage Washington’s opponents. Equally, the breakup of states such as Bosnia would weaken Washington’s allies and, by extension, the United States’ own position.

Consequently, Washington has come to the defense of groups seeking to uphold the existing international borders. It has backed the Ukrainians with heavy weaponry and massive financial support. It has threatened to cut funding from any state which recognizes the four new republics extracted by Russia from Ukraine. In the Balkans, the United States has intensified pressure on Serbia to accept the formalization of Kosovo’s statehood, including the Serb-populated north and, at the urging of Bosniaks, it has imposed rounds of sanctions on the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, the United States has signed a new security pact with Cyprus, suspended its longstanding arms embargo on the country and, at the behest of Nicosia, promoted a new round of talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriots aimed at reunifying the island. Meanwhile, in Asia, the United States has ramped up its naval presence in the South China Sea, sold advanced weaponry to Taiwan and shored up relations with states whose territorial integrity is seemingly threatened by China.

The exception to this general rule is Washington’s support for the enlargement of the EU, a change to the territorial settlement in Eastern Europe, but one it nonetheless supports. From Washington’s perspective, the enlargement of the EU—which shares core American beliefs in democracy and the rule of law, and whose membership largely overlaps with NATO—also represents an enlargement of the American sphere of influence and a bulwark against the encroachment of genuinely rivalrous powers such as Russia, China, and to some extent Türkiye.

 

A New Age of Secession

So where are these efforts to reconstitute borders leading? Potentially, the United States can hold the line against territorial revisionism and prove Ukraine to be an isolated case—a one-off challenge to borders that either fails or at least goes no further. Indicatively, no other state has taken a concrete step to revise borders in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—not even China, the most powerful opponent of the United States, suggesting Washington’s manifest opposition to border changes remains a strong deterrent.

Yet, the idea that Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine lacks wider significance seems unlikely in the context of growing geopolitical competition. Conditions today are not like those of the Cold War, when the U.S. and the USSR agreed on the need to freeze borders in Europe, or the post-war period when the U.S. alone decided whether borders changed. Today’s fluid geopolitical environment, which pitches the established power of the United States against a declining but combative Russia and a powerful emerging China, is more reminiscent of the early-twentieth century when challengers actively pursued border adjustments as a tool to gain political advantage.

In this respect, the likelihood is that Ukraine is not an isolated case but the first in a new cycle of border changes. Significantly, the United States has failed to face down the challenge from Russia which seems set to keep its acquisitions, especially as support grows in Washington and European capitals for a peace deal that would cede parts of Ukraine to Russia, emboldening other challengers. In this context, rather than abandoning its goals, China is almost certainly biding its time to make a move on Taiwan, and Türkiye on Northern Cyprus. The same goes for smaller revisionist groups.

At a minimum, this implies some kind of broader adjustment of borders in coming years. Russia might make a move on Russian-speaking regions in the former Soviet Union, such as Transnistria in Moldova or even parts of the Baltic States. China will expand its sphere of influence in the South China Sea and potentially make a move on the contested Spratly Islands, currently controlled by Vietnam. Türkiye will advance its ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean. Some borders will move in Eastern Europe and further afield, in parts of Africa and Asia.

However, even this prognosis is conservative judged by the historical record which highlights the potential for a radical shake-up of borders as the law of unintended consequences kicks in. Russia is particularly vulnerable, as its campaign to control Ukraine takes its toll on the state. Large numbers of Russia’s educated young have left the country, the government has been forced to suppress the private economy, and Europe is unlikely to ever restore the state of economic relations it once enjoyed with Russia, even if the sanctions against it are lifted.

Externally, Russia has become dependent for its security and prosperity on an avaricious China, which is trying to restore its historical boundaries. Internally, peoples in an array of Russian republics, from Kaliningrad and Tatarstan, to Smolensk and the rebellious northern Caucasus have called for independence from Moscow. Most recently, Russia has faced a leadership crisis in Chechnya, bringing the republic’s future into question and a terrorist attack in the neighboring separatist province of Dagestan.

Against this backdrop, it is not impossible that Russia could go the way of other revisionist powers, which have sought to expand their borders only for this to backfire and the state to contract or even collapse. This fate befell Austria after annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1914, Germany after the double failure of its efforts to establish a nation state in the twentieth century, and the Soviet Union after trying to expand its influence into Afghanistan in the 1980s. If so, the significance of Russia’s move on Ukraine will be to have accelerated a long-term process of Russian decline.

The EU too is vulnerable as an incomplete proto-state with limited internal legitimacy, no army of its own, and no centralized authority to take decisions about matters of foreign and security policy. Still, it has nonetheless sought to confront Russia, define China as a strategic opponent, and all this while maintaining an ambivalent relationship with the United States, especially one that might be led by Donald Trump. Already, the EU’s body politic has buckled under the strain of its sanctions regime on Russia, which has triggered a prolonged recession and split EU members along political lines. Under conditions of more intense geopolitical competition, the survival of the EU is not guaranteed, at least in anything like its current form.

Nor, if the EU collapsed, could the survival of its constituent members be assured. Fragile multinational states such as Belgium and Spain have survived as EU members, locked into a larger political structure in which national governments are constrained and dissatisfied minorities enjoy guarantees of their cultural and political rights. But the willingness of these minorities to accept the territorial status quo is less certain in the absence of the EU, leaving them subject to direct rule by governments that, in the context of the ensuing political instability, would be likely to have a strong nationalist character.

In such circumstances, the winners would undoubtedly be the United States and China, which would divide up Russia and Europe. Formally or informally, China could take what were once Chinese parts of Russia’s Far East, including cities such as Vladivostok, and sponsor friendly buffer states on its periphery. The United States could also sponsor new states on the territory of today’s Russia and encourage its allies to absorb parts of the Russian periphery—Poland could annex the stranded Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, Finland could retake Karelia, and Japan could have back Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. In the process, any commitment to the idea of territorial integrity would inevitably be abandoned in favor of new norms that imbued the process with a moral and legal veneer.

In the EU, the new superpowers would co-opt its weak constituent parts. China could consolidate its sphere of influence in Central Europe and the EU’s western core, while Northern and Eastern Europe would move more squarely into the American orbit. Meanwhile, the United States could realize its stated goal of acquiring Danish-controlled Greenland, a largely empty territory within its geographical vicinity, with an abundance of rare minerals which it wants for itself and does not want to fall into the hands of China.

This may be an extreme scenario, but nothing can be ruled out. For as long as the great powers remain in a state of heightened competition and see border adjustments as a political tool to promote their interests and beliefs, the prospect remains of further border adjustments, of which Ukraine is seemingly a harbinger. Whether these trends are contained or escalated remains to be seen, but radical outcomes such as the demise of Russia and the EU, and the expansion of the United States and China have clear historical precedents.

The one thing that is certain is that borders will once again change. If a map is a snapshot of the balance of international power and the interest and beliefs of the great powers at any one moment in time, then today’s map, which reflects a world shaped by the United States and its allies, is unlikely to be the map of tomorrow as old powers fall and new powers arise. As processes of territorial revisionism begin to unfold, a new age of secession marked by annexations, unifications, breakups, the appearance of new states and the disappearance of old ones, seems all but certain to begin.

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