ABSTRACT
Secession and ethnic conflict are both close and distant at the same time. On the one hand, secession and ethnic conflict are viewed as largely overlapping, and in extreme cases are treated as synonyms, often without rigorous theoretical or empirical foundation. On the other hand, the academic literature on secession and that on ethnic conflict have developed relatively independently of each other, without much mutual referencing. Many fundamental works in the literature on ethnic conflict are virtually ignored in the literature on secession, and vice versa. This chapter thus attempts to clarify the conceptual differences between the two, and, at the same time, to bridge the gap between the study of these two by integrating important findings and arguments in the literature on both issues.
