Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy against Separatists
Ahsan I. Butt
Abstract
This book argues that states, rather than separatists, determine whether a secessionist struggle will be peaceful, violent, or genocidal. The book 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, the book 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 s ... More
This book argues that states, rather than separatists, determine whether a secessionist struggle will be peaceful, violent, or genocidal. The book 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, the book 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. Using more than one hundred interviews and extensive archival data, the book 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. The book's deep historical approach to the 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.
Keywords:
secessionist struggles,
negotiated concessions,
repression states,
separatist movements,
peaceful concessions,
genocide,
Pakistan,
India,
secessionist movements
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501713941 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501713941.001.0001 |
