In South-east Asia, Cambodia and Thailand are embroiled in a military and political stand-off over a disputed temple, while feelings are running high in Malaysia over Pedra Branca in spite of a recent International Court of Justice ruling awarding the island to Singapore.

In North-east Asia, new Japanese education guidelines that referred to islands also claimed by Korea and China as Japanese territory have sparked diplomatic rows and public protests.

Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev did not reach agreement at the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit over a handful of islands claimed by both countries.

The only bright spot was the border agreement between China and Russia last week, which finally settled a very long border that had been the subject of armed conflict within living memory.

Do these disputes mean that despite the high-profile political and security cooperation that we have witnessed in the region over the last two decades, East Asia remains an arena of zero-sum security competition and old-fashioned territorial wars?

While it would be far-fetched to predict war, East Asia does suffer from an unfortunate confluence of historical and geopolitical factors that lay the groundwork for difficult relationships between countries that share borders.

In the contemporary international system, inter-state boundaries are customarily drawn at formal junctures in history - the end of wars and the end of colonialism being the most pertinent in East Asia. Badly defined boundaries can lead to bad neighbourly relations.

The current stand-off between Cambodia and Thailand results from an unresolved dispute over the land surrounding the Preah Vihear temple on the border. Though French colonial maps demarcated this land as Cambodian, its status was challenged by Thailand after the French left Indochina.

The International Court of Justice had ruled that the temple belonged to Cambodia, but left the issue of the land around it unsettled. Disputed colonial maps also featured prominently in the Pedra Branca dispute.

The territorial conflicts in North-east Asia are the result of regional wars and colonisation. Japan's disputes with China over the Senkaku/

Diaoyu islands, with Korea over the Dokdo/Takeshima islands, and with Russia over the Kuril/Northern Territories islands all have long histories stretching beyond the contemporary inter-state system. However, the modern element in these disputes stems from the post-World War II peace settlements.

The Senkaku/Diaoyu islands were considered part of Taiwan and were annexed, along with Taiwan, by Japan in 1895. But with Japan's defeat in World War II and the liberation of Taiwan, Beijing considered that the islands had also been reclaimed from Japan, though Tokyo continues to occupy them.

Similarly, Japan claims that the Northern Territories are not part of the Kuril islands, which it ceded to Russia as part of the San Francisco Treaty in 1951. Indeed, the two countries have yet to sign a formal peace treaty.

The Dokdo/Takeshima dispute is the messiest, resulting from confusion across the different drafts of the San Francisco Treaty, which first recognised the islands as Korean, then Japanese, before leaving them out altogether.

In all these cases, the lack of clearly defined and accepted boundaries makes for bad fences, which in turn provide focal points for disputes. Three factors exacerbate the effects of bad fences.

First is the high premium the region places on the principle of sovereignty. That is understandable, give the large number of relatively young decolonised states in Asia. In addition, the region has a number of states that resulted from partitions and civil wars. The legacy of imperial expansion by Japan before and during World War II has not helped. One of the most obvious symbols of state sovereignty is territorial control and integrity.

Second is the very strong public sentiment that often accompanies competing territorial claims. These stem from local factors, such as displaced populations like the Japanese who were evicted from the Northern Territories.

Territorial disputes tend to become enmeshed with nationalist sentiments - most virulently in North-east Asia, where concern over the rise of China, and resentment over Japan's wartime behaviour and post-war attitudes, have exacerbated disputes. Everywhere, including in South-east Asia, public sentiments can be whipped up by politicians exploiting victimhood mentalities or resentments against richer or more powerful neighbouring countries.

Finally, there is geopolitics. The realist school of thought holds that in a Hobbesian world, most neighbours are inevitably bad neighbours because security is a zero-sum game and neighbours necessarily view each other with suspicion and act to secure their interests.

Thus, the resurgence of high-profile territorial disputes - China-Japan, Japan-

Russia, Japan-Korea, and Korea-China - are to be expected as the balance of power in East Asia shifts with China's rise.

A realist view would also predict that large countries that share contiguous borders are destined to be bad neighbours because of power competition. This is where the Sino-Russia case is interesting. Though the two countries have had a long history of boundary disputes, including a border war in 1969, their foreign ministers reached a formal agreement to demarcate the entire Russia-China border last week that reportedly involved Russia ceding 174 sq km of territory to China.

This agreement demonstrates that neighbouring great powers do not necessarily have to be at each other's throats. Given sufficient incentives and political will, they can come to see that it would be in their interest to mend fences so as to improve relations. In this case, the incentives included economic cooperation, the desire to stabilise relations with a crucial large neighbour so as to concentrate on other strategic priorities, and the need to hedge against a common concern, the United States.

East Asia will continue to suffer uncertain neighbours and uncertain fences for the foreseeable future. Whether these disputes can be managed peacefully hinges on the degree to which history and geopolitics pose obstacles to negotiation.

The most dangerous disputes are the ones that involve claims that are difficult to prove in international law, that involve high levels of domestic public sentiment, and that do not offer scope for significant economic or strategic pay-offs to justify territorial agreement.

The region has many examples of such potential disputes.

The writer is a university lecturer in international relations and fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford University.