View article

Secession is the withdrawal of a group and its territory from the authority of a state of which it is part (Horowitz 1998: 182). During the Cold War, academic study of secession, as a phenomenon in its own right, was neither widespread nor systematic, even though incidents of it were frequent.¹ Its perceived importance increased after 1989, as separatist undertakings claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands around the globe and led to major international crises, including external military interventions, generating much uncertainty and confusion among both practitioners and students of politics. For more than 20 years now, it has also been a topic of rather spirited debate among political philosophers and normatively inclined scholars of international relations. At the core of the phenomenon lies the question of who has the right to govern whom and in what jurisdictional domain, a question that political …