Theologically Motivated Territorial Revisionism: Religion, Institutions, and the Failure of Deterrent Logic in Territorial Conflict

Abstract

In July 2024 the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful and held that all new settlement activity must cease immediately. Settlement authorisation continued. Standard explanations for this non-response — the non-binding character of advisory opinions and the asymmetry of enforcement capacity — account for why compliance was not compelled but not for why adjustment was not chosen, since states routinely modify behaviour under reputational and legal pressure that falls well short of compulsion. This article proposes Theologically Motivated Territorial Revisionism (TMTR) to explain that residual. The framework holds that where a territorial claim is theologically formulated and institutionally embedded within the machinery of government, the cost–benefit ledger on which legal and diplomatic pressure operates does not contain the term that pressure is designed to move. TMTR is deliberately constructed as a claim about institutions rather than about belief: it does not require that any office-holder be sincere, only that theological claims have been converted into constraints that bind regardless of sincerity. The framework is differentiated from five adjacent concepts — conventional revisionism, constructed indivisibility, sacred-space theory, religious nationalism, and settler colonialism — with the constructivist account of indivisibility treated as the principal rival. Scope conditions and falsification criteria are specified, the framework is applied illustratively to Israeli territorial policy since 1967, and a comparative probe considers Hindu nationalist claims in Jammu and Kashmir.