This book provides a comparative survey of recent attempts at secession and separatist movements from across Europe and Asia, and assesses the responses of the respective host governments. With political analysis of recent cases ranging from the Balkans, the USSR, the UK and the Basque Country, to Sri Lanka, Burma, China, Tibet and Taiwan, the authors identify both similarities and differences in the processes and outcomes of secessionist and separatist movements across the two distinct regions.

In Secession and Security, Ahsan I. Butt argues that states rather than separatists determine whether a secessionist struggle will be peaceful, violent, or genocidal. He investigates the strategies, ranging from negotiated concessions to large-scale repression, adopted by states in response to separatist movements. Variations in the external security environment, Butt argues, influenced the leaders of the Ottoman Empire to use peaceful concessions against Armenians in 1908 but escalated to genocide against the same community in 1915; caused Israel to reject a Palestinian state in the 1990s; and shaped peaceful splits in Czechoslovakia in 1993 and the Norway-Sweden union in 1905. Butt focuses on two main cases—Pakistani reactions to Bengali and Baloch demands for independence in the 1970s and India's responses to secessionist movements in Kashmir, Punjab, and Assam in the 1980s and 1990s. Butt's deep historical approach to his subject will appeal to policymakers and observers interested in the last five decades of geopolitics in South Asia, the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and ethno-national conflict, separatism, and nationalism more generally.

About half of today's nation-states originated as some kind of breakaway state. The end of the Cold War witnessed a resurgence of separatist activity affecting nearly every part of the globe and stimulated a new generation of scholars to consider separatism and secession. As the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War approaches, this collection of essays allows us to view within a broader international context one of modern history's bloodiest conflicts over secession. The contributors to this volume consider a wide range of topics related to secession, separatism, and the nationalist passions that inflame such conflicts. The first section of the book examines ethical and moral dimensions of secession, while subsequent sections look at the American Civil War, conflicts in the Gulf of Mexico, European separatism, and conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The contributors to this book have no common position advocating or opposing secession in principle or in any particular case. All understand it, however, as a common feature of the modern world and as a historic phenomenon of international scope. Some contributors propose that "political divorce," as secession has come to be called, ought to be subject to rational arbitration and ethical norms, instead of being decided by force. Along with these hopes for the future, Secession as an International Phenomenon offers a somber reminder of the cost the United States paid when reason failed and war was left to resolve the issue.

The boundaries between secessionism and separatism are often blurred, and in many cases study of secessionism encompasses that of separatism and vice versa. Recognising this inherent relationship, this book provides a comparative survey of recent attempts at secession and separatist movements from across Europe and Asia, and assesses the responses of the respective host governments. The essays address two main questions which arise from the relationship between state governments and secessionist movements: first, how secessionist or separatist movements gather support and mobilize their target populations and second, how central political authorities respond to the challenges that secessionist or separatist movements pose to their capacity to control the country. With political analysis of recent cases ranging from the Balkans, the USSR, the UK and the Basque Country, to Sri Lanka, Burma, China, Tibet and Taiwan, the authors identify both similarities and differences in the processes and outcomes of secessionist and separatist movements across the two distinct regions. This volume will be an invaluable resource for those who wish to understand the dynamics of secessionist movements and as such will appeal to students and scholars of Asian and European politics, comparative politics, international relations and conflict studies. It will also be helpful to practitioners and policy-makers who wish to understand and contribute to the resolution of such conflicts.

The USSR’s dissolution resulted in the creation of not only fifteen recognized states but also of four non-recognized statelets: Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. Their polities comprise networks with state-like elements. Since the early 1990s, the four pseudo-states have been continously dependent on their sponsor countries (Russia, Armenia), and contesting the territorial integrity of their parental nation-states Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. In 2014, the outburst of Russia-backed separatism in Eastern Ukraine led to the creation of two more para-states, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), whose leaders used the experience of older de facto states. In 2020, this growing network of de facto states counted an overall population of more than 4 million people. The essays collected in this volume address such questions as: How do post-Soviet de facto states survive and continue to grow? Is there anything specific about the political ecology of Eastern Europe that provides secessionism with the possibility to launch state-making processes in spite of international sanctions and counteractions of their parental states? How do secessionist movements become embedded in wider networks of separatism in Eastern and Western Europe? What is the impact of secessionism and war on the parental states? The contributors are Jan Claas Behrends, Petra Colmorgen, Bruno Coppieters, Nataliia Kasianenko, Alice Lackner, Mikhail Minakov, and Gwendolyn Sasse.

This book examines secessionist terrorism in a comparative context across Europe and Eurasia. The volume seeks to uncover comparative linkages between terrorism and secessionism; specifically examining terrorist organizations that also have a political goal of independence. It examines a wide range of case studies, including the IRA in Northern Ireland, ETA in the Basque Country, FLNC in Corsica and ARD in Brittany, KLA in Kosovo, PKK and TAK in Turkish Kurdistan, and IK in Chechnya. In doing so, the book shows the linkages in terrorist tactics and demands, as well as when and how ceasefires come into place. Ultimately, none of the terrorist organizations studied here has obtained their maximalist goal of gaining independence, but each has caused significant bloodshed, and has contributed to the debate on the future of governance in Europe and Eurasia. The major strength of this format is to glean wider lessons on ethno-nationalism, as well as the causes and outcomes of terrorist actions. Each case study also updates the literature on the individual cases to provide the most recent account of events in these countries. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and political violence, ethnic conflict, nationalism, European politics and International Relations in general.

At the same time, Doyle negotiates the conceptual slipperiness of nationalism by discussing it as both constructed and real, unifying and divisive, inspiration for good and excuse for atrocity."--BOOK JACKET.