List of irredentist claims or disputes

This is a list of irredentist claims or disputes. Irredentism is any political or popular movement that seeks to claim or reclaim and occupy a land that the movement's members consider to be a "lost" (or "unredeemed") territory from their nation's past. Not all territorial disputes are irredentist, although they are often couched in irredentist rhetoric to justify and legitimise such claims both internationally and within the country.

Prominent irredentist disputes (by area)
Prominent irredentist disputes during the past century have included:

Europe 

Russian irredentism can be divided into three categories: broad, intermediate, and narrow.

 The broad sense includes all lands that historically made up the Russian Empire and/or the Soviet Union at their maximum extents. It may also extend to neighbouring countries or regions that are populated by peoples over which Russia ruled (e.g. Iranian Azerbaijan in Iran), or peoples which are closely related to them due to linguistic, ethnic or religious ties. Historically, Russia has pursued all of these avenues; examples include the Panslavism movement to put all of the Balkans (where there exists Slavic and Eastern Orthodox majorities) under Russian hegemony; the Third Rome philosophy, which focused on re-claiming the former Byzantine Empire regions (in particular the warm winter port of Constantinople, today Istanbul), and in addition establishing a hegemony over Greater Armenia and the Holy Land (Lebanon, Palestine etc.). Simultaneously, there were ambitions to continue expansion into Persia and even India (see The Great Game). The Russian Empire also planned to force Qing China to cede Xinjiang, Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, and Korea. While the Russo-Japanese War ended most of these prospects, the Soviet Union would eventually create a sphere of influence in this area in the form of the Mongolian People's Republic and the Tuvan People's Republic. Finally, in Russian America, Russia held claims extending from the Aleutian Islands to northern California, but these plans were cancelled after Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867.
 The intermediate sense includes some or all of the independent countries and/or territories that made up the historical Russian borders. These may include Moldova, Ukraine, eastern Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states, and Finland in Europe, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia in the Caucasus, and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Some narrower definitions include only the pro-Russian breakaway states of Abkhazia (Georgia), South Ossetia (Georgia), and Transnistria (Moldova), as well as Kars Oblast in Turkey and Batum Oblast partly in Turkey also (Ardahan Province) and Adjara in Georgia.
 The narrow sense of Russian irredentism focuses only on regions that are populated by ethnic Russians that are outside the Russian Federation, such as: Narva in Estonia; lands around Daugavpils and Riga in Latvia; Sloboda Ukraine, Novorossiya, and Crimea from Ukraine (the latter of which has de facto joined the Federation); Gagra district in Georgia (also claimed by Abkhazia); and lands between the Russian border and the rivers of Ural and Irtysh in Kazakhstan, as well as parts of Semirechye.

Historical and fringe disputes
Many fringe and opposition groups in various countries maintain their own set of territorial claims, which are given below:

In the 1955 referendum, Saarland, a previous French protectorate territory, voted to reunite with Germany.
 French claimed Alsace-Lorraine before World War I, after which the territory was returned to them.
 Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro claimed various European parts of the Ottoman Empire and Albania (both of which the four divided among themselves) before the First Balkan War, where they took these claims to the battlefield, and won.

Asia

Middle East

South and Central America

North America

Africa

See also
 Ethnic nationalism
 Ethnic cleansing
 Identity politics
 Lebensraum
 Revanchism
 Status quo ante bellum
 Manifest destiny
 Historical powers

References

*