ABSTRACT
For as long as political communities have existed, discontented minorities within them have attempted to break away. Indeed, the Ionians enlisted Greece to help them escape the Persians as far back as 479 BC (Herodotus 1997: 719–20). They were certainly not the first, and far from the last to make such an attempt. Negative experiences with governance routinely cause people to see themselves as distinct from their rulers; as bound to a common fate with those who share the same ascriptive or socio-cultural traits; and as members of communities better served by self-government than alien domination. Self-determination demands can take various forms including calls for increased civil and cultural rights, local autonomy, condominium, suzerainty, or confederal arrangements. A small fraction of these movements will seek total independence, resolving that their governors can not—or more likely will not—accommodate their desire for self-determination. Since the rise of the modern state, these claims of complete territorial and political independence are manifest in secessionism, wherein a nationalist movement attempts to formally withdraw from an existing state in order to create a new one. 1
