The concept of self-determination and the acquisition of territorial sovereignty are highly deliberated concepts. The principal notion of self-determination is a people’s right to decide their State’s political status and its fundamental purpose in the international community. In correlation with this is the notion of territorial sovereignty which denotes the legal competence that a State enjoys in respect of its territory, and its use implies that a State retains relative control and ownership over its territory. There are five traditional modes of acquisition commonly accepted in international law– namely occupation, accretion, cession, conquest and prescription — and their contemporary significance in international law is questionable. This is primarily due to the modern requirement imposed by Courts that a State has to demonstrate it has a superior right to ‘possess a section of land’ as opposed to the actual ‘mode’ of acquisition to which the land was originally discovered and claimed.
