ABSTRACT
The second, related challenge has been that external actors, most consequentially great
powers, have, for one reason or another, proved unable to maintain consistency in their
approach to unilateral self-determination claims. This is not a matter of simple national
political preferences or interests: often contested claims develop into highly complex
and protracted conflicts where outsiders confront multiple, and sometimes mutually con-
tradictory, considerations and imperatives. Still, when the great powers agree on a seeming
inconsistency-such as when they accepted, or acquiesced to, the unilateral secession of
Bangladesh in 1971-1972 or when they eventually, in late 1991, decided to regard the
breakup of Yugoslavia as a case of ‘dissolution’ rather than a series of unilateral seces-
sions-interstate order, if not necessarily intrastate order, is maintained.
