1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910793818703321

Autore

Waters Timothy William

Titolo

Boxing Pandora : Rethinking Borders, States, and Secession in a Democratic World / / Timothy William Waters

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, CT : , : Yale University Press, , [2020]

©2020

ISBN

0-300-24943-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (303 pages)

Collana

Yale scholarship online

Disciplina

320.12

Soggetti

Boundaries

Secession

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Also issued in print: 2020.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface: Why Write a Book about Secession? Why Read One? -- A Note on Reading This Book -- Introduction: The Boxes We Live in, the Beliefs We Have -- 1. The Failure of a Flourishing Idea: The Decadence of Self-Determination -- 2. The Map of Our World: The Limits of the Classical System -- 3. The Measure of Nations: Testing the Assumptions behind the Classical Rule -- 4. A New Right to Secession -- 5. People, Territory, Plebiscite: The Main Features—Objections and Answers -- 6. Broader Implications: Features and Effects of the New Rule -- 7. The Hardest Part: Creating a Right of Secession -- Conclusion: The Value of Asking -- Appendix: Scholarly Ferment on a Decadent Topic -- Notes -- Works Cited and Consulted -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

A timely and provocative challenge to the foundations of our global order: why should national borders be unchangeable? The inviolability of national borders is an unquestioned pillar of the post–World War II international order. Fixed borders are believed to encourage stability, promote pluralism, and discourage nationalism and intolerance. But do they? What if fixed borders create more problems than they solve, and what if permitting borders to change would create more stability and produce more just societies? Legal scholar Timothy Waters examines this possibility, showing how we arrived at a system of rigidly bordered states and how the real danger to peace is not the desire of people to



form new states but the capacity of existing states to resist that desire, even with violence. He proposes a practical, democratically legitimate alternative: a right of secession. With crises ongoing in the United Kingdom, Spain, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and many other regions, this reassessment of the foundations of our international order is more relevant than ever.