In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

DAVID ARMITAGE Secession and Civil War For the past two centuries, state breaking has been the primary method of state making around the world. More than half the states currently represented at the un emerged from the wreckage of colonial empires, the collapse of multinational federations, or the fission of existing states. The rate of state birth accelerated in the decades after the Second World War; the incidence of state death, whether through conquest, occupation, confederation, or dissolution , declined in the same period. Whenever a new state is recognized as legitimately occupying territory formerly claimed by another state, a process of secession can be said to have reached its successful conclusion. Where once 51 states had been (in 1945), 192 would be (by 2010). This near quadrupling of the number of acknowledged states seemingly vindicates the principle of self-determination and indicates the international community’s endorsement of secession as the major means by which to achieve independence. Yet in the last sixty years there have been more attempted secessions than there have been accessions to the un. Moreover, at least until the past decade, only a minority of these secessions were peaceful. Violence has been secession’s most frequent companion. In this chapter, I want to examine secession’s relationship with perhaps the oldest, often the most destructive, and in the past half century certainly the most prevalent form of collective violence: civil war. At first blush, the link between secession and civil war would seem to be quite straightforward. A group within a state, exasperated by what it sees as the suppression of its right to self-determination, asserts that right as a claim to independent statehood. In response, the existing state maintains its right to territorial integrity and authority over all its inhabitants by forcibly resisting that claim with coercive violence. Secession—the attempt to create a new state—thereby leads to civil war—armed conflict within an established state. Examples from the United States in 1861 to Yugoslavia in 1991 confirm this correlation. Although there have been some peaceful secessions— [38] David Armitage for example, Norway’s from Sweden in 1905, Iceland’s from Denmark in 1944, Singapore’s from the Malaysian Federation in 1965, Montenegro’s from Serbia in 2006, and (so far) Kosovo’s, also from Serbia, in 2008—they are exceptions: “Until the 1990s violence and violent conflict was a feature characterizing most secessions and attempts at secession.” And the kind of conflict secession was most likely to produce was internal, or civil, war. The logic of history is seemingly as impeccable as it is implacable: secession causes civil war, just as civil war was until recently the most likely outcome of attempted secession. The most comprehensive recent macrohistorical account of warfare around the world counts 484 separate wars between 1816 and 2001; 296 of those were civil wars, of which 109 were fought with the goal of creating a new state rather than taking control of an existing one. Secessionist conflicts thus comprise more than a fifth of all wars in the past two centuries and account for a substantial minority of the civil wars in this period. Many of these secessionist civil wars have accompanied “the two institutional transformations that have shaped the landscape of the modern world,” that is, imperial expansion and the process of state creation, especially as a product of decolonization . The onset of such wars also “show[s] a dramatic peak immediately before nation-state formation,” while “the odds of civil war onset are more than five times higher in the first two years after independence than in the other postindependence years.” These findings appear to show a direct correlation between secession and civil war, and not just a causal one (secession leads to civil war) but also a circumstantial one (secession and civil war are more likely to occur together during the process of nation-state formation, especially in a context of anti-imperial decolonization). Yet they can also be taken to prove that the correlation between secession and civil war, however strong, is strictly contingent. Nonetheless, until recently, most definitions of secession implied that violence and resistance would necessarily be part of the process. This reflected the assumptions that the rulers of states would be likely to protect their territorial integrity by force and that they would be justified in doing so. As the Commission of Rapporteurs in the Åland Islands case affirmed in 1921: “To concede to minorities, either of language or religion, or...

Share