This article focuses on unilateral sovereignty referendums pursued by territorial autonomies. Due to their unilateral character, such referendums are unlikely to gain external recognition and, as a result, fail to effect or prevent any de jure change in sovereignty. However, they are still pursued despite these constraints, suggesting that they serve purposes other than formal changes in sovereignty. To explain this phenomenon, the article proposes a framework of seven potential motivations. The framework is examined through the case of Gagauzia’s 2014 referendums, which addressed two key issues: Moldova’s foreign alignment and Gagauzia’s deferred independence. The analysis follows three referendum stages — proposal, initiation, and implementation — focusing on the dual leadership of the executive and legislative branches. Drawing primarily on newspapers affiliated with these branches, the study finds empirical support for three key motivations: advancing the individual and collective political interests of autonomy leadership, strengthening Gagauzia’s ties with its patron (Russia), and empowering the territorial autonomy vis-à-vis the parent state (Moldova). This article contributes a framework of motivations for unilateral sovereignty referendums tailored specifically to territorial autonomies, going beyond existing explanations developed for all polities. It also provides a detailed account of one of the most significant political events in Gagauzia’s history.

While secessionist movements have surged globally over the past century, the prevailing structuralist and institutionalist approaches inadequately capture the dynamics of secessionism. We argue that lost autonomy triggers, sudden transformative events symbolizing a loss of autonomy for ethnic minorities, can be profoundly disruptive, eliciting pro-secessionist backlashes. Despite their significance, the causal impact of such triggering events remains underexplored. We investigate two typical cases: the 1992 Great Bank Affair in the Faroe Islands and the 2010 Spanish Constitutional Court decision to reform Catalonia’s autonomy statute. Using synthetic control models, we demonstrate that these triggering events were essential for the subsequent secessionist waves, which would not have occurred otherwise. Qualitative process tracing analyses further support our findings, indicating that these events were perceived as highly disruptive, causing significant shifts in public opinion and prompting political responses. Our findings underscore the importance of recognizing lost autonomy triggers as proximate causes of secessionism.

The article focuses on two sets of autonomist demands that the far-right Sudeten German Party (SdP) in Czechoslovakia put forward during 1937–38. Its central thesis being that both sets were marked by a profoundly close interplay between territorial and non-territorial approaches at accommodating national diversity, it sets to explore this relationship, highlighting the underlying dynamic. Although the 1937 Volksschutzgesetze posed as an ostensibly “pure” case of non-territorial autonomy, whereas the 1938 Skizze über Neuordnung der innerstaatlichen Verhältnisse entailed major territorial provisions, in both cases the practical end-goal implied territorial autonomy. A closer look into their inner logic and intellectual origins however, also reveals a shared, essentially non-territorial underpinning. While the SdP agenda was firmly centered on national territory, its specific völkisch and organicist understanding of nationality manifested a clear preponderance of non-territoriality. Both sets of autonomist demands may thus be treated as a potentially maximalist combination of territorial and non-territorial arrangements resting on a fundamentally non-territorial notion of Volkspersönlichkeit. Encompassing all the members of the national group, the latter was simultaneously conceived as the basic carrier of political will. Volksschutzgesetze and Skizze thus represented clear examples of illiberal (re-)conceptualization of national autonomy, informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal, and political thought.

Justice and peace are commonly seen as mutually reinforcing, and key international peacebuilding documents stress the importance of human rights. Is this apparent normative shift reflected in post-Cold War peace agreements? The existing literature is divided on this issue but has crucially treated both conflicts and peace agreements as aggregate categories. This article argues that the conflict type and the agreement's ‘core deal’ impact on the inclusion, or exclusion, of human rights provisions. Based on new coding of the 29 comprehensive agreements signed between 1990 and 2010, it compares agreements signed in territorial and non-territorial conflicts, and agreements with and without territorial autonomy. Qualitative Comparative Analysis is used to examine the different combinations of conditions that led to the inclusion of human rights. The analysis finds that agreements signed in territorial conflicts are significantly less likely to include effective human rights provisions, especially if the settlement includes territorial autonomy. Moreover, such provisions tend to be the result of high levels of international involvement, and the consequent lack of local commitment, or outright resistance, undermines their implementation. These findings point to important trade-offs between group rights and individual rights, and qualifies the notion of a liberal peace.

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia.