Viability as a strategy of secession

This paper focuses on a specific dimension of the strategies that secessionist movements and entities employ when seeking independence, recognition, and legitimacy: viability. It does so by looking at two geographically and historically removed cases, namely Abkhazia and Somaliland. While the idea of viability is most closely connected with economic and financial factors, it also involves infrastructure, energy, and other aspects of public policy that allow for the provision of a minimum level of service in a given territory or to a given population. In other words, secessionist actors turn into service providers; this is due to a number of reasons, but crucially among them is that of putting viability at the heart of their discourse about independence, recognition, and legitimacy on the international arena, as well as harnessing viability for internal legitimacy. At the same time, viability is also closely linked to breaking away from the isolation given by a lack of international recognition; secessionist actors need to become facilitators of relations with the outside (whether political or commercial) that would ensure a survival of the secessionist entities in a globalised world. The paper traces the trajectories of the two widely different aforementioned cases and compares how viability was developed and how it was integrated in the discourse of secessionist authorities. Building on an extensive doctoral research on the political economy of Abkhazia, it adds a comparative and cross-regional dimension to the study of the strategies of secession.