ABSTRACT

This collection presents an analysis of the concept of secession and its constitutional accommodation alongside an assessment of the effects of secession in constitutional and international law. The work proposes a new approach and insights into the existing literature that fill a gap from multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives.

The book approaches the topics of secession, constitutionalism, and their relationship from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, including the analysis of particular secessionist examples, such as Catalonia, the Basque Country, Tigray, the Palestinian minority in Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Mapuche Nation, from a comparative constitutional perspective. Elucidating these issues from different methodological and conceptual perspectives produces novelties in the scientific and constitutional debate. The interplay between constitutions, constitutional law, and secession is indeed explored from philosophical, socio-legal, but also from strict constitutional law outlooks.

Written by constitutional and public international law experts, the book will be of interest to students, academics, and researchers working in the areas of constitutional law, legal theory, theory of the state, philosophy of law, and political science.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

part I|60 pages

Epistemological construction

chapter 1|15 pages

Life and death of states: Secession as birth and not suicide

De-transcendentalizing a political taboo

chapter 2|18 pages

Secession and its cognition

Conceptual distinctions and the patterns of legal imagination

chapter 3|25 pages

Loyalty and disloyalty to the constitution

Meditations on 1776, 1861, and 2022

part III|64 pages

Federalism, autonomy, and secession

chapter 10|20 pages

Multilevel constitutionalism and diversity

Prospects for secession in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

chapter 11|21 pages

Non-territorial autonomy, not secession

The Palestinian-Arab minority in the Israeli Jewish-democratic state

part IV|108 pages

International regulation and mediation of secession

chapter 12|35 pages

Building bridges

A Janus-faced secession

chapter 13|23 pages

Catalonia

The right to self-determination and the consent of the governed

chapter 15|28 pages

Tigray and the (un)conditional right to self-determination, including the right to secession

Constitutional and international law perspective