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Secession and the invisible hand of the international system

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2014

RYAN GRIFFITHS
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Abstract

This article argues that 1945 constitutes an historical inflection point from a period of state expansion to state contraction and that this transformation is primarily the result of changes at the international level. Just as security and economic pressures drove lead states to expand in earlier times, changing conditions in the post-1945 period led to a contraction in state size. The change from multipolarity, the development of the territorial integrity norm, the shift to nuclear deterrence, and the burgeoning global economy contributed to the milieu in which states evaluate the costs and benefits of holding territory, and this has enabled states to permit secession more frequently. The result has been an increase in the rate of peaceful secession and a corresponding proliferation in the number of sovereign states. I test this argument both qualitatively and quantitatively using original data on secessionist movements and internal administrative regions between 1816 and 2005.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 559 - 581
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2014 

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References

1 See Data section for a discussion of this definition.

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64 In keeping with the ISD list (Griffiths and Butcher 2013), as well as the list maintained by the Correlates of War Project, Russia is treated as one continuous state between 1816 and 2005. Thus, Russia is the rump state and successor of the Soviet Union.

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75 The average dropped state accounted for a little over two observations, with a modal value of 1.

76 Any state with more than ten observations or significant effects is listed in Table 1.

77 150 miles is one of the thresholds used by the COW dataset on Colonial possessions. See Colonial/Dependency Contiguity Data, 1816–2002. Version 3.0, available at: {http://correlatesofwar.org}.

78 However, 60 per cent (130 out of 216) of the conflict cases also possessed an administrative unit, so having one is clearly not a sufficient condition. Since the variable perfectly predicts peaceful secession, I dropped it from the model rather than remove the 86 observations where conflict occurred in the absence of an administrative unit (a requirement to run the regression).

79 These include the 14 non-Russian Union Republics and Chechnya. The Russian Republic is treated as the rump state and successor to the Soviet Union.

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