Secession and the Sovereignty Game: A Response to Pegg, Kartsonaki, and Jenne

Abstract

It was a pleasure to receive these reviews from three experts in the fi eld. Each raises valuable points and suggests ways in which the manuscript could be improved. I cannot respond to all of them given space limitations but will focus on the most general comments and the ones that may be the most useful and/or interesting to the reader. The sovereignty game refers to the game-like dynamic between secessionist movements, who aim to become independent sovereign states, and the existing club of states, who have an incentive to limit membership to the club. As I am sure the reviewers would agree, this is an extremely important and quite often neglected aspect of international life. After all, club admittance is a core theme in other domains, from sororities to biker gangs to academic departments to medieval guilds. It is the process of determining who can be a member, and baked into that process are issues of identity and power. In international politics, there is an evolving set of norms, rules, and laws — what I call the international recognition regime — that governs the process of becoming a sovereign state. At the strategic level, all secessionist movements are the same insofar as there is only one sovereignty club and one entrance into it. But the tactics deployed to further that strategy are shaped by the setting in which each secessionist movement operates. Let me pause here to address a concern about the theoretical model. I examined 136 secessionist movements between 1946 and 2011. I grouped them into six kinds based on local factors. For example, democratized movements were those that existed in states with high democracy (Polity) scores. De facto state movements existed in settings where the breakaway region was mostly sundered from the larger state. Weak and strong combative movements were those that were institutionally connected to non-or weakly-democratic states. After sorting the movements based on their setting, I then made predictions about the types of compellence and normative appeal tactics they were likely to pursue. The table in my summary essay in this symposium lays out the six kinds and their predicted tactics, along with an example for each.