Margaret Moore (Queen's): Collective Self-determination and Secession in the Current World Order

This paper aims to develop a distinctive account of secession which is not vulnerable to some of the problems that afflict the two dominant accounts - the plebiscite view of self-determination on the one hand and the just-cause account on the other. On the plebiscite view of secession, a majority of any territorially concentrated group acquires the right to secede if that decision is reached through a democratic procedure (such as a referendum). The just-cause account holds that there is a right of secession when a group has been the victim of egregious injustice at the hands of the state, which is defined in terms of the violation of human rights, but also includes unjust annexation and the violation of internal agreements, and the appropriate remedy is the establishment of a separate state. In this paper, I show that both are flawed: the first by assuming that self-determination can be equated with majoritarian decision-making in a referendum on the question; and the second, in failing to consider the central value of self-determination in its theory of the legitimacy of secession. In what follows, I argue that there is a complex relationship between self-determination, state legitimacy and secession, which is not captured by either account.