Browsing by Subject "Secession"

Secession is a watershed event not only for the new state that is created and the old state that is dissolved, but also for neighboring states, proximate ethno-political groups and major powers. This project examines the problem of violent secessionist conflict and addresses an important debate at the intersection of comparative and international politics about the conditions under which secession is a peaceful solution to ethnic conflict. It demonstrates that secession is rarely a solution to ethnic conflict, does not assure the protection of remaining minorities and produces new forms of violence. To explain why some secessions produce peace, while others generate violence, the project develops a theoretical model of the conditions that produce internally coherent, stable and peaceful post-secessionist states rather than recursive secession (i.e., secession from a new secessionist state) or interstate disputes between the rump and secessionist state. Theoretically, the analysis reveals a curvilinear relationship between ethno-territorial heterogeneity and conflict, explains disparate findings in the literature on ethnic conflict and conclusively links ethnic structure and violence. The project also contributes to the literature on secessionist violence, and civil war more generally, by linking intrastate and interstate causes, showing that what is frequently thought of as a domestic phenomenon is in fact mostly a phenomenon of international politics. Drawing upon original data, methodological advances at the interface of statistics, computer science and probability theory, and qualitative methods such as elite interviews and archival research, the project offers a comprehensive, comparative and contextual treatment of secession and violence.

We examine the determinant of peaceful settlement between central governments and secessionist groups in the context of the Third World. There is a heated debate regarding the root cause of ethnic separatism movements. There is also fundamental disagreement among scholars regarding the role played by territorial autonomy in resolving ethnic separatist movements; some believe that the system of autonomy per se is the source of separatist rebellion, while some insist that autonomy agreements are effective in resolving otherwise insoluble conflicts. We investigate the validity of social-economic and political factors proposed by recent studies in explaining the origin of these secession movements. Applying comparative analysis between Indonesia and China, we find that those socio-economic and political factors shaped by the interaction between the central governments and ethno-political groups are not contributory factors. Instead, our results indicate that it is the states' reconciliatory approach per se that matters in determining political outcomes of ethno-political secession in developing or transitional countries.

This Dissertation critiques the prevailing law and dominant scholarly treatment of the right to emigrate, which I understand to mean the conjunction of the rights (i) to physically leave one’s nation of membership and (ii) to renounce one’s citizenship therein. Contrary to this status quo, which holds that this legal right is and ought to be near-unconditional, it defends the revisionary view that legitimate nations, which are in good standing with the international community and respect human rights, should be permitted to recover great losses unjustly sustained as a result of unrestricted emigration by taxing their emigrants on their worldwide income on an ongoing basis where necessary, or iff such attempts at taxation prove infeasible, inadequate, or otherwise inappropriate, by employing as a backup measure the least severe restrictions on emigration required to forestall such injustices. In general, tax and economically motivated emigrants, as well as more well-off emigrants, should be taxed and regulated prior to doing so for emigrants who relocate for other reasons, such as for political or cultural reasons. In practice, however, one would expect that nations would seldom have to rely upon actual physical restrictions. This is because a home nation’s mere threat to restrict the relocation of its desirable emigrants would often provide potential destination nations with an incentive to cooperate with the home nation in the administration of a tax on its emigrants—which, under the regime I defend, the home nation would be required to avail itself of before resorting to physical restrictions.