Everyone knows the South China Sea disputes are too complex to fix. Too many countries are involved, there is too much history to unravel and too few people understand the details. This conventional wisdom is wrong, though. In the last few years, researchers have gathered enough information about the history of the South China Sea to resolve the competing territorial claims. The biggest obstacle to resolving the disputes is that Vietnam, China and the Philippines claim whole groups of islands rather than specific features. Beijing asserts a claim to every feature within the “ nine-dash line ” drawn on Chinese maps of the South China Sea since 1948. This means the Paracels in the north, the Spratlys in the south, Scarborough Shoal to the east and the Pratas in the northeast. Taipei claims each of the four island groups separately while Vietnam claims the Paracels and Spratlys. The Philippines claims Scarborough Shoal and the Kalayaan Island group , which is all the Spratlys except for Spratly Island itself. As a result, these claimants are playing a zero-sum game. No compromise is possible: they either win sovereignty over every feature in the island group or nothing. Thankfully, there is a solution. It is one that has already been successful in Southeast Asia: presenting verifiable evidence to a neutral tribunal. Indonesia and Malaysia resolved their dispute over the islands of Ligitan and Sipadan through the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2002 . In 2008, the ICJ resolved the dispute between Malaysia and Singapore over some barren rocks in the Singapore Strait. The ICJ ruled that Pedra Branca belonged to Singapore while Middle Rocks belonged to Malaysia even though they were just a kilometre apart. It ruled in favour of Singapore over Pedra Branca mainly because Singapore had carried out acts of physical administration there, notably by building a lighthouse on the rock. The ICJ rejected Malaysia’s vague claims that Pedra Branca had belonged to the Sultanate of Johor “from time immemorial” and instead examined the documented evidence of occupation and administration. It reached its conclusion based on principles of international law. While these principles have their origins in Medieval Europe, they can now be considered global. It is possible to apply them to all the disputed islets in the South China Sea. The digitisation and opening of many national archives have allowed researchers to examine the history of claims in the South China Sea in much greater detail. It is now possible to make more authoritative statements about who did what and when. The documentary evidence makes clear two important points. First, it tells us that states occupied different features at different times in a haphazard manner. States installed people or structures on certain islets in competition with one another, and these were often transient affairs. Just because officials landed on a particular feature did not mean they maintained effective occupation over it. Second, it tells us the various claimants never administered entire archipelagos or island groups, let alone the entire South China Sea. Just because an action was taken on one island did not mean effective occupation was asserted over other features. Claimants often made rhetorical claims by publishing maps or issuing declarations, but this is different to establishing real occupation. Understanding this history in the light of the ICJ ruling on Pedra Branca opens a way forward to resolve the disputes. Rather than examining rival claims to entire archipelagos, the ICJ or some other body only needs to reach conclusions about physical acts of administration on each feature. Our knowledge of the archives tells us these will only have taken place in the modern era. South China Sea: calls to honour Hague ruling 5 years on, but Beijing digs in The key is to disaggregate the claims. Just as in the Pedra Branca case, it is theoretically possible to examine claims to the sovereignty of each feature in the South China Sea separately. Thankfully, most of the disputed reefs have only one physical occupier, which should make assessing sovereignty claims simpler. That said, some have had other occupiers in the past and a tribunal would have to rule on the relative merits of rival claims. Based on the historical evidence already in the public domain, we know that, with some exceptions, the current pattern of occupations in the South China Sea is the only one that has ever existed. This suggests the basis for a compromise solution to the South China Sea disputes: each claimant keeps what it currently occupies and drops its claims to the other features. There is a legal name for this principle: uti possidetis , ita possideatis , or what you have is what you keep. No state would suffer the indignity or strategic disadvantage of withdrawing from any feature they currently occupy. Each state would simply have to acknowledge they are never going to acquire all the rocks and reefs they claim. Once they recognise this, governments should work towards bilateral agreements, agreeing on one another’s occupations and committing not to disturb the status quo. Once this is done, governments could drop the unnecessary angst and the absurd spending on military hardware and begin to address the real issues in the South China Sea, starting with the collapse of its fish stocks. Bill Hayton is an associate fellow with the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House in London. He is the author of “The South China Sea: the struggle for power in Asia” and “The Invention of China”. This is an edited and abridged version of an analysis paper just published by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore