Strategic Constraints

This chapter examines the lessons that national-secession campaign leaders can draw from the successful secessions since 1945. It defines the concept of national-secession and identifies on this basis the 171 campaigns that secured a place on the agenda of the western great powers from 1945 to 2016. This census also identifies those campaigns that employed violence as a tactic in their disputes with their central governments. The 26 successful secessions that achieved independence through international intervention, expulsion by the central government, abandonment, or collapse at the center give campaign leaders little evidence to expect they can achieve independence by forcing this on the central government by the campaign’s own means without a fortuitous intervention of events in the central government or from foreign powers.