“Kuril Dispute”: Political and Legal Models of Solution in the Aspect of Constitutional Transformation

Abstract

Introduction. The fate of the Southern Kuril Islands remains a stumbling block to the conclusion of a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, as well as the further development of trade, economic, environmental, political, diplomatic, and other relations between the two states. At the same time, the constitutional changes that took place in Russia in 2020 and the need to ensure national interests dictate the need to find alternative ways to solve the problem, taking into account the political and legal experience of resolving similar territorial disputes. Methods and materials. The methodological basis of the research includes dialectical, general logical, theoretical (abstraction, historical method), empirical (description, comparison, experiment) methods, as well as a special formal legal and applied interdisciplinary method of event analysis. Analysis. Based on the study of domestic and foreign scientific researches devoted to constitutional transformations in Russia and Japan, problems of Russian-Japanese relations over the Southern Kuril Islands dispute, and political and legal models of resolving territorial disputes, legislation and international documents, potential models of resolving the “Kuril dispute” are analyzed and compared, and an attempt is made to find an acceptable solution of the territorial dispute between Russia and Japan over the ownership of the Southern Kurils. Result. The authors conclude that each of the considered political and legal models of resolving territorial disputes (“Aland”, “Hong Kong”, “Amur”, “Peace Park model” and other variants) has its own specifics due to the individual characteristics of a particular territorial dispute, so it cannot be applied to the resolution of the models of resolving the “Kuril dispute” in its pure form.