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Introduction
One of the characteristics marking the end of the Cold War has been an apparent explosion in the
number of demands for full-fledged ethnic self-determination. Several states have fallen apart into
smaller, ethnically-based countries, with the results ranging from the relatively unproblematic break-up of
Czechoslovakia, to the brutality of Bosnia, to the apparent ability of the division to bring hostilities to a
halt in Slovenia. The range of experiences has helped fuel the debate over the desirability of giving in to
the secessionist movements’ desire to form their own countries out of the lands of existing states. The
debate has separated the scholarly community into two diametrically-opposed camps: those who view the
policy as a disastrous, unacceptable course of action that only leads to future violence (e.g. Horowitz,
1985; Etzioni, 1992; Kumar, 1997) and those who see it as the only policy that is able to prevent the
future armed conflict (e.g. Kaufmann, 1996; Tullberg and Tullberg, 1997). Because much of the debate
has been marked by each camp promoting its own viewpoint, there is currently little consensus on the
issue of what makes some secessions
1
result in peaceful (e.g. Czechoslovakia) versus violent (e.g.
Ethiopia) outcomes. Our principal aim is to begin shedding light on this issue.
In the drive for self-determination, the secessionists disagree with the central government over
who should have sovereign control over not only which people but also over which land. Hence, the
disagreement is territorial in nature and what begins as a territorial dispute with domestic origins leads –
if the country is divided – to the creation of new international boundaries. The boundaries demarcate two
or more internationally-recognized countries that have been created by the secession: (1) a rump state
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(e.g. Russia) that has lost control over a portion of its homeland, non-colonial territory to (2) one or more
1
The policy of dividing countries has been termed “partition” or “secession,” but unfortunately there is no
consensus in the literature on whether the two terms describe the same or different phenomena (for details, see e.g.
Horowitz, 1985; Heraclides, 1991; Sambanis, 2000). Those who argue that the two terms are different maintain that
secessions are domestically-driven while partitions are internationally-driven. Because we are interested in the
consequences of internally-driven dissolutions of states, we employ the term secession throughout even though we
realize that determining at what level of international support one could draw a supposed line to distinguish between
partitions and secessions may be impossible. That is, some degree of international support (even if only in the legal
sense) is necessary before a sub-state region seeking independence is admitted to the club of nation-states.
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In practice, one can identify the rump state as the state that commonly retains the institutions and control over the
capital city of the former, unified state.
Convention