Methfessel, Christian2026-01-282026-01-282025https://open.ifz-muenchen.de/handle/repository/9350Broadly speaking, annexations and secessions rarely succeeded during the Cold War, and international borders remained surprisingly stable. The territorial integrity norm, enshrined in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, has proven to be very robust—which is somewhat remarkable, as the UN Security Council, the organ originally expected to prevent breaches of the norm, was for the most part unable to act due to the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union. Within Europe, this antagonism manifested itself in nuclear deterrence, preventing the outbreak of an open war between East and West, while the division of Europe and the integration of the rival camps into security alliances—NATO and the Warsaw Pact—impeded the escalation of territorial disputes between members within each camp. Yet in Africa and Asia, territorial conflicts repeatedly erupted in the wake of the waves of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s. Existing explanations for the strength of the territorial integrity norm after the Second World War agree that border changes by violent means were indeed rare during this period, but views on which actors were responsible for this stability differ widely. Mark W. Zacher, building on democratic peace theory, emphasizes the role played by Western liberal democracies. Malcolm Anderson argues that the superpowers “maintained an environment hostile to secessionist movements and to the acquisition of territory by violent means.” Studies on state borders on the African continent tend to focus on the desire of Africa’s postcolonial elites to maintain the borders their states inherited when they became independent. Congruently, historical studies on secessionist conflicts and the norm of self-determination have demonstrated that the leaders of the newly independent states predominantly agreed that only anti-colonial liberation movements could claim the right to independence in a given colony, while separatist demands from national movements within postcolonial states were perceived as illegitimate. This chapter situates the evolution of the territorial integrity norm in the context of the global Cold War and thus contributes to research examining the connections between superpower rivalries and regional conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It aims to shed light on how the interplay of the rise of Afro-Asian internationalism and the Cold War struggle over influence in the “Third World” shaped debates at the United Nations and thereby facilitated the establishment of an international order of sovereign states with fixed borders on a global scale.enghttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/