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Territorial integrity is the principle under international law where sovereign states have a right to defend their borders and all territory in them from another state.
Territorial integrity refers to the territorial ‘oneness’ or ‘wholeness’ of the State. As a norm of international law, it protects the territorial framework of the independent State and is an essential foundation of the sovereignty of States.
Territorial integrity refers to the principle under international law that recognizes the inviolability of a state's borders and its right to maintain control over its territory.
The notion of territorial integrity is fundamental to the Westphalian State system, and underlies the contemporary rules of international law on the use of force, as embodied in the Charter of the United Nations and customary international law.
Territorial integrity is a fundamental principle in international law that reinforces state sovereignty by affirming that nations have the right to control their territory without external intervention.
Thus, a useful definition of territorial integrity is “the principle under international law that nation-states should not promote secessionist movements or to promote border changes in other nation-states, not impose a border change through the use of force” (Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe).
In this article I first trace states' beliefs and practices concerning the use of force to alter boundaries from the birth of the Westphalian order in the seventeenth century through the end of World War II. I then focus on the increasing acceptance of the norm against coercive territorial revisionism since 1945.
The main reason why state litigants do not raise such concerns in their pleadings is the prioritization of their territorial integrity. The principle of territorial integrity safeguards a state’s territorial framework and represents the state’s ‘oneness’ or ‘wholeness’.
In essence the principle of territorial integrity is the elaborated and sophisticated legal expression of territoriality. It is intimately linked to the state as a legal entity the main objective of which is to ensure its perennial existence within a specific territory whose borders have been established in accordance with international law.
Political philosophy has witnessed a recent surge of interest in territorial rights—what they are, who holds them, what justifies them—as well as in a broader theory of territorial justice, which situates said rights in an account of distributive justice, thereby addressing the scope of the rights. This interest is hardly surprising.