Putting Secession in Comparative Perspective: Cases from Eurasia

This paper is part of the research project, funded by the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, which explores issues concerning Self-Determination and Secession in the EU's 'Near Abroad'. Recent developments in the UK and Spain - a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 and a vote on the political future of Catalonia in autumn 2017, as well as developments in the EU's immediate neighbourhood, such as an armed conflict in East Ukraine and annexation of Crimea by Russia, have once again reignited the debate about national self-determination and the right to secession. This paper aims to re-examine this highly contentious topic by focusing on the dynamics of self-determination (and secession) in the former Soviet Union and provide a comparative case study analysis of secessionist conflicts in Azerbaijan (Nagorno Karabakh), Georgia (Abkhazia/South Ossetia), Moldova (Transdnistria) and Ukraine (Crimea/Eastern Ukraine). Working with previously unpublished archival material and having an unprecedented access to some of the political and military elites in these regions, the author seeks to historically contextualise current claims to self-determination and secession in these territories and examine in depth how the historical developments in these regions relate to (and shape) the contemporary ones. By placing these cases in comparative perspective, the paper aims to observe (and analyse) historical continuities and changing trajectories in how the principle of self-determination has evolved in the Soviet Union and how it has been applied in the former Union republics since the disintegration of the USSR. By better understanding different forms of agency and institutional structures that have fostered (or curtailed) these conflicts the author aims to fill the gaps in the existing political science literature on the subject and move the scholarly debate beyond the "Kosovo precedent".