CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VIII (1) ContemporaryEurasia81 | Page 100

TERRITORIAL AUTONOMY AND SECESSION AS STRATEGIES OF CONFLICT …
confrontation, ‘‘since the central government will not recognize the right to
secede, those who wish to pursue such a course will need to resort to
arms". 61 The stakes were raised to the point of a large-scale military
confrontation and consolidated the diametrically opposed objectives, thus
paving way for an enduring rivalry 62 for decades to come. Thereafter, the
sides have been contesting the rights of self-determination and territorial
integrity, thus gradually transforming the initially intercommunal conflict to
an intra-state and inter-state one. 63
We will now analyse these developments to evaluate their outcomes
as solution-oriented strategies of conflict management. We treat solutions in
terms of the right to secede and their outcome. Thereby, we seek to define
whether negative or positive peace was reached, where negative peace is
understood as the absence of violence and positive peace is the integration of
human society. 64 By the right to secede we are interested in the institutional
perspective on the matter, rather than legalistic. In this regard, Buchanan
rightly asks, “Under what conditions should a group be recognized as having
a right to secede as a matter of international institutional morality, including
a morally defensible system of international law?” 65 Buchanan categorizes
two approaches of this right: remedial right only theory and primary right
theory. 66 Considering the former one superior, the author proposes two
preconditions for a just cause of remedial secession: when the host state
threatens the physical survival of the minority or violates its basic human
rights, or when the minority was unjustly deprived of its sovereign
territory. 67 Some oppose secession, arguing that it does not provide the
newly established entity with a homogeneous population and does not
reduce violence and minority oppression 68 . This argument does not apply in
our case, since (due to migration and displacement) Nagorno Karabakh
became a highly homogeneous entity by the early 1990’s, with virtually no
minorities. In this regard, positive peace has been achieved within the
territory of Nagorno Karabakh. This homogeneity also excludes the criticism
of Wilsonian self-determination, contending that because of ethnocentric
secessionist claims, state boundaries will continuously subdivide.
Nevertheless, the politicization of grievances and enduring inter-state rivalry
61
Donald L. Horowitz, “The Cracked Foundations of The Right to Secede”, Journal of
Democracy Vol. 14, Issue 2, (April 2003), 11.
62
Zeev Maoz, and Ben D. Mor, Bound by Struggle. The Strategic Evolution of Enduring
International Rivalries, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 4.
63
Laurence Broers, “From “frozen conflict” to enduring rivalry: reassessing the Nagorny
Karabakh conflict”, Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 43:4,
(2015): 559-560, DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2015.1042852.
64
"An Editorial." Journal of Peace Research 1, no. 1 (1964): 2.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/422802.
65
Allen Buchanan, Theories of Secession. Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1) (1997): 32.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid, 37.
68
Horowitz, “The Cracked Foundations of The Right to Secede”, 6.
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