Who Rules Where Over Whom When the Fighting Stops: How States and Secessionists Control Territory and People After Separatist Wars

Abstract

Speaker: Nicholas Barker, University of Birmingham. Discussant: Megan Stewart, American University’s School of International Service My book project, Who Rules Where Over Whom When the Fighting Stops: How States and Secessionists Control Territory and People After Separatist Wars, presents a study of the termination and aftermath of secessionist wars, using a theory building research strategy with two case studies – the Georgia-Abkhazia conflict (covering the period 1994-2006) and the Serbia-Kosovo conflict (1999-2008) – to develop an empirically-grounded theoretical framework which tries to explain state and secessionist post-war strategies for controlling territory and populations. I draw on fieldwork and archival research carried out in Georgia, Abkhazia, Serbia, Kosovo and the UN archives in New York, and present further evidence to evaluate and extend the framework from ‘shadow cases’ of secessionist wars in the Caucasus, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, contributing to knowledge of how post-war political orders are formed and contested. Chapter Two presents the book's theoretical framework. First, it conceptualises control strategies (the outcome of interest) in terms of the constitutive features of territorial and demographic control. Second, it theorises states’ and secessionists’ post-war objectives in terms of a cleavage of reincorporation versus full separation which is broken down into objectives about revising or preserving de facto control, reflecting the constraints of a post-war environment (constrained objectives, the main explanatory factor). Third, it identifies territorial and demographic features of post-war environments that actors use to translate objectives into strategies. Fourth, it provides an argument about how the parts fit together: objectives explain control strategies, mediated by the constraints and opportunities of the environment, with actors adopting control strategies in the expectation that doing so will establish or influence the ‘facts on the ground’ of territorial and demographic control in a way that aligns with their constrained objective and brings about the intended outcome. Fifth, the framework provides expectations about which control strategies are associated with particular constrained objectives (the observable implications).