Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-14138255-20140815002519/@comment-25308133-20140819013832

Regarding borders and wars:

There are generally only three reasons why countries go to war (there are exceptions but they're not the norm), the attacking country needs more space to expand, the attacked country has some resource the attacker wants, or ideological reasons. I'd gotten the impression so far that the kingdoms are small collections of fortress cities besieged on all sides by Grimm. This is tentatively supported by Ozpin mentioning to Ironwood that travel between kingdoms is difficult. So with the world being large, and the kingdoms being small, plus them all having an active enemy already in the Grimm, most of those reasons don't really apply. Certainly the first doesn't, there's plenty of land, they just have to be able to take it and hold it from the Grimm. The second is unlikely due to the trouble in transporting the resources home. So that leaves the third. That one is the likely cause of the Faunus war. Whether that third has also caused wars between the kingdoms themselves is unknown. But Ironwood seemed to by running a sales pitch in that demonstration Ruby and Penny watched, so it's likely there hasn't been a war recently, at least not between Vale and Atlas.