International Relations - Parastates Secession Separatism and Breakaway Regions

Lecture 13: Parastates - Secession, Separatism, and Breakaway Regions

This short lecture examines the phenomenon of what I call the "parastate": a territorial entity that possesses some limited amount of sovereignty and independence but is unable to achieve legal international recognition as a sovereign state by the international community.

Examples today include Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Somaliland, Western Sahara, Palestine, and even Taiwan.

They are known by a number of names: de facto states, secessionist states, partially-sovereign states, and breakaway states. They possess most of the trappings of statehood and are supported by at least one major international power to keep them on the map. But because they're opposed by at least one other major power that prevents then from getting into the United Nations, their sovereignty remains partial and, largely, illegal - especially by the country they broke away from.

This leaves us with a frozen conflict that will most likely not be solved by diplomacy, and unless the parent state can retake the lost territory though the military, it will remain a frozen conflict.

This material also forms the base of a project I'm currently working on with colleagues around the world examining different types of parastates. We hope to have something published in a few months.

Dr. Michael Rossi

Department of Political Science
Rutgers University
November 30, 2015

Chapter Markers

00:30 - Parastates and Questions of Sovereignty
06:00 - Challenges to the International State System
10:10 - Parastates in the World Today
15:02 - Parastates as Frozen Conflicts
22:07 - Global Security
24:56 - The Importance of the United Nations
26:51 - Option 1: Host State Recognizes Parastate's Indpendence
29:30 - Option 2: Parastate Reunifies with Host State
33:56 - Option 3: Parastate is Reconquered by Host State
36:00 - The Inconvenient Truth about Parastates

Music - Queen, "I Want to Break Free", The Works, 1984
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4Mc-NYPHaQ

Видео International Relations - Parastates Secession Separatism and Breakaway Regions канала Michael Rossi Poli Sci