ABSTRACT
On 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. This event, more than any other of that tumultuous year, symbolised the end of the Cold War. The Cold War itself had been the defining aspect of the bi-polar international order that had emerged in the wake of World War II. With the passing of the Cold War a new international order emerged. An important feature of this new international order is that ‘peace is less often threatened by conflicts between states than by friction, power contests, and the breakdown of order within states’.1 States today are more concerned with internal rather than external threats to their security and territorial integrity. Most of these internal threats come from nationalist groups seeking to secede, by force if necessary, and establish their own independent states.2 In what Allen Buchanan suggests is ‘the age of secession’,3 the right to self-determination of peoples as developed principally by the United Nations (UN), is almost universally relied upon as the legal basis for secession.
