territorial ownership
Definition
Territorial ownership refers to the collective psychological sense that a physical land and its geopolitical borders belong to one's group, conceptualised as one dimension of collective psychological ownership (CPO-T) distinct from ownership over national narratives. In Finland, this dimension was examined separately from epistemic ownership across a quota-representative sample of ethnic majority Finns and a panel of second-generation immigrants, with confirmatory factor analysis supporting a two-factor solution in both samples. Collective investment was the strongest predictor of CPO-T across both groups, while among majority Finns, intimate knowledge also contributed significantly, reflecting intergenerational socialisation and historical foundations of national belonging. For the ethnic majority, CPO-T was specifically associated with exclusive determination rights, a pattern not replicated for epistemic ownership, indicating that the territorial dimension carries a distinct exclusionary function tied to historical dominance and perceived threats to geopolitical control.
Sources: Szebeni et al. (2025)
Related Terms
- collective psychological ownership (1 shared article)
- collective epistemic ownership (1 shared article)
- intergroup relations (1 shared article)
- second-generation immigrants (1 shared article)
Applications
Territorial Ownership and Epistemic Ownership
Territorial ownership and epistemic ownership represent empirically distinct dimensions of collective psychological ownership of a country, with confirmatory factor analysis confirming a two-factor structure over a single-factor model in both majority and minority samples in Finland. The two dimensions correlated strongly but not redundantly, with r = .805 among majority Finns and r = .694 among second-generation immigrants. They serve different psychological functions: for the ethnic majority, CPO-T predicted exclusive determination rights, while epistemic ownership predicted collective responsibility, a divergence that would be invisible if the two dimensions were treated as one.
Sources: Szebeni et al. (2025)
Territorial Ownership and Exclusive Determination Rights
Among ethnic majority Finns, territorial ownership showed a sizable positive association with perceived exclusive determination rights, with a standardized path coefficient of β = 0.33. This association was not replicated among second-generation immigrants at a comparable magnitude, and it was not the pattern observed for epistemic ownership, which instead predicted collective responsibility within the majority group. The finding suggests that CPO-T functions as a basis for asserting exclusionary entitlements over national futures and borders among historically dominant groups.
Sources: Szebeni et al. (2025)
Territorial Ownership and Collective Investment
Collective investment was the strongest predictor of territorial ownership in both the ethnic majority and second-generation immigrant samples in Finland, with standardized path coefficients ranging from 0.42 to 0.64 across groups and ownership dimensions. For majority groups, investment claims draw on historical foundations and ancestral labor, whereas for minorities they reflect more recent civic contributions.
Sources: Szebeni et al. (2025)
