Constitutional Law and Politics of Secession Comparative Constitutional Change Series

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.

List of figures

List of contributors

Introduction

PART I

Epistemological construction

1 Life and death of states: Secession as birth and not suicide: De-transcendentalizing a political taboo

ANTONI ABAT I NINET

2 Secession and its cognition: Conceptual distinctions and the patterns of legal imagination

ZORAN OKLOPCIC

3 Loyalty and disloyalty to the constitution: Meditations on 1776, 1861, and 2022

SANFORD LEVINSON

PART II

Constitutional Accommodation of secession

4 Taming the beast: On constituent power and secession

GIUSEPPE MARTINICO

5 A procedural model of constitutionalized secession revisited

MIODRAG JOVANOVIĆ

6 Secession, policy autonomy, and recognition

MARK TUSHNET

7 The theory and practice of self-determination in multinational democracies: A systematic comparison

FÉLIX MATHIEU & DAVE GUÉNETTE

8 Indigenous claims and the Chilean 2022 Draft Constitution in light of the secession paradigm

NATALIA MORALES CERDA & FRANCISCA POU GIMÉNEZ

PART III

Federalism, autonomy, and secession

9 Constitutional law, federalism, and secession

ERIKA ARBAN

10 Multilevel constitutionalism and diversity: Prospects for secession in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

MAJA SAHADŽIĆ

11 Non-territorial autonomy, not secession: The Palestinian- Arab minority in the Israeli Jewish-democratic state

HILLY MOODRICK-EVEN KHEN

PART IV

International regulation and mediation of secession

12 Building bridges: A Janus-faced secession

JOSÉ ALBERTO AZEREDO LOPES AND CATARINA SANTOS BOTELHO

13 Catalonia: The right to self-determination and the consent of the governed

HÉCTOR LÓPEZ BOFILL

14 The regulation of secession

PAU BOSSACOMA BUSQUETS

15 Tigray and the (un)conditional right to self-determination, including the right to secession: Constitutional and international law perspective

MIHRETEAB T. TAYE

Index

Antoni Abat i Ninet is Maria Zambrano Researcher at Institut d’Estudis Europeus, UAB, Barcelona and Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law and Legal Theory at the Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.