Unrecognized States in the International System

Nina Caspersen, Gareth Stansfield

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138788954
• eBook ISBN: 9781136849992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Unrecognized states are territories that have achieved de facto independence, yet have failed to gain international recognition as independent states. These territories constitute anomalies in the international system of sovereign states and often present significant challenges to policy makers, as evidenced by the war in Georgia and the continued debate over Kosovo's independence.

This book draws on both theory and case studies to better understand the phenomenon of unrecognized states, demonstrating that the existence of such entities is less unusual than previously assumed. Moving away from an overt focus on case studies, the chapters present various themes that link the emergence, operations, and development of unrecognized states and assess how the established order of states responds to the challenges they present:

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• How do unrecognized interact with the international system of sovereign states? How does it shape their emergence, operations and development?

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• How do these entities develop in a context of non-recognition?

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• Are we witnessing a new form of statehood, or are these entities better understood as states-in-waiting?

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• What are the strategies available for dealing with unrecognized states? Could power-sharing or autonomy provide a solution or are more innovative strategies necessary?

With contributions from leading scholars in a number of fields, this book will appeal not only to students and scholars of Political Science, International Relations, Geography, Area Studies, Sociology, and Conflict Resolution, but also to journalists, government bodies and NGOs.

Part I

Conceptualizing Unrecognized States

1 Theorizing Unrecognized States

Sovereignty, Secessionism, and Political Economy

James Harvey and Gareth Stansfield

Introduction

Unrecognized states are anomalous features of the international system and international society. They are, in short, very odd, and their oddities present numerous challenges to the international system and those who study it. They are odd in terms of their very existence as spatial entities in a world already divided comprehensively into states and ordered by international boundaries. The awkwardness of juxtaposing unrecognized states alongside or, more accurately, ‘over’ or ‘under’ recognized states in terms of sovereignty is also clearly odd.¹ Never the easiest concept to define or theorize, nothing encapsulates the ‘organized hypocrisy’ of sovereign states quite so much as how domestic sovereignty may be held and exercised in unrecognized states which do not have international legal sovereignty compared with those which have questionable domestic sovereignty yet are recognized as international legal sovereign entities.² Stephen Krasner (1999) considers the ‘muddle’ that exists around the concept of sovereignty, identifying four different ways in which the term has been used: Westphalian, domestic, interdependence, and international legal. The majority of his analysis focuses on Westphalian and international legal concepts of sovereignty.³ However, in the case of unrecognized states, the confusion – and even the hypocrisy – becomes starker when domestic sovereignty is given additional weight, as it is usually the case that unrecognized states begin from a starting point of enhanced domestic sovereignty vis-à-vis the international legal sovereign entity.

Yet unrecognized states are also anomalous in terms of how they exercise domestic sovereignty. With mostly limited resources and questionable legitimacy borne from political structures that had emerged under extreme circumstances, the manner in which unrecognized states exercise control over their territory can vary enormously. Often authoritarian or semi-authoritarian in nature,⁴ dependent on considerable patronage structures,⁵ yet relying on being seen as embracing democratization strategies in order to illicit support from the international community,⁶ while usually trying to embarrass the parent state which holds international legal sovereignty over their domains, unrecognized states are often schizophrenic in terms of how they project their authority at home and present their legitimacy abroad.

The Problematic Language of Abstraction

It is these oddities, and the ideal to make sense of them, that this chapter attempts to tackle. But this is a difficult task because unrecognized states are products of their immediate domestic and regional environment, conditioned by historical context and affected unevenly by wider international and globalized pressures. Significant among these pressures is the political economy of trade in resources and the needs of the market – economic dynamics which this chapter contends exert a profound influence, in many cases, upon the international politics of unrecognized states, secession, and territorial revision in the global state system. One of the biggest challenges facing anyone attempting to tackle theoretical and conceptual issues surrounding unrecognized states is the question of abstraction. Before any attempt is made to unpick the complicated politics and political economy of secession, self-determination, state-building, and survival in the international system, which goes hand-in-hand with the study of unrecognized states, one is forced to confront the very confused and confusing language of abstraction used to describe and analyse them.

A problem which has confronted scholars since unrecognized states began to attract significant attention in the 1990s, and continues to exert considerable influence today, can be rationalized as the problem of adding further conceptual abstractions to concepts – namely statehood and sovereignty – which are already abstract, enigmatic, and contentious. Put simply, the concept of an unrecognized state starts with properties that may be considered features of the continuum of states and statecraft in the international system, but through the dynamics of non-recognition, the politics of location, territorial disputes, and long-term legal ambiguities, these entities field a counterintuitive challenge to the concepts of statehood and sovereignty which then demands unrecognized states be approached as examples of something else completely. On the one hand, these abstractions of sovereignty and statecraft are loosely regarded as states, albeit unrecognized in international law, but on the other hand, many of the dynamics which sustain these de facto independent territories⁷ can be said to militate against their inclusion in the same theoretical, conceptual and categorical space occupied by sovereign states in the international and interstate systems.

Theorizing Unrecognized States?

This chapter attempts to explore the complex conceptual terrain surrounding unrecognized states and the theorizing of them. Its primary aim is to explore whether or not the problematic archetype of ‘unrecognized states’, as both a term and a concept deployed by analysts across disciplinary boundaries, contains sufficient conceptual flexibility and robustness to encompass the widely differing causal dynamics and political trajectories each case represents. In short, is it possible to consider unrecognized states at a level of abstraction that lends itself to theorizing their formative influences, developmental trajectories, political economy, and end-state? The concept of the unrecognized state, it is argued, is formed out of disciplinary perspectives and conventions that have built a rich and varied empirical understanding of a range of cases throughout recent history, but have struggled to do so in a systematized manner that would lead to a theoretical framework or conceptual understanding of the phenomenon encompassing emerging trends and realities on the ground in regions where these entities exist or have existed.

This failure exists with regards to the starkest element of many unrecognized states’ existence. When required to accommodate the conceptually ambiguous and meta-theoretical implications of secession, or attempted secession, which leads to the creation of unrecognized political and territorial space in many cases, the concept of the unrecognized state as an explicitly secessionist entity becomes a site of analytical contention. How far should we render these territorial and ethno-political conflicts a direct product of the state-creation impulse? To what extent are de facto autonomy and de facto independence, not de jure recognition and sovereignty, the most likely outcomes for secessionist movements in these cases? What causal role did state fragmentation play in the creation of contemporary examples of unrecognized states? Can a political economy of unrecognized statehood be said to exist in the globalized international system? These, and other, questions remain unanswered largely because relevant conceptual research in this area has not been forthcoming – a situation which currently hinders our understanding of unrecognized states as an extant feature of international politics. By focusing on the empirical variance inherent within any discussion of unrecognized states as a continuum within international politics, the chapter highlights the paradoxical distance between the concept of ‘unrecognized statehood’ and the causal processes which have, for well over a decade, defined the phenomenon. This is achieved through an exploration of the problems inherent in developing a conceptual continuum which is capable of charting the evolution of the unrecognized state, and how the problems encountered during this process indicate a level of conceptual ambiguity which is rarely approached in terms of representing a workable set of abstractions.

The second half of this chapter introduces a relatively understudied aspect of unrecognized states – how those endowed with resources that have value to the international community of established states engage with them to their mutual benefit. Many unrecognized states reside in areas rich in natural resources or areas of considerable strategic and foreign policy importance to external actors and interests. For recognized states, their unrecognized counterparts can often provide access to resources which their own national economies have a desperate need for, but with economic gain coming with political risk. This risk is tied to the strengthening of the unrecognized state which brings with it a range of consequences that could include further consolidation of the entity and the weakening of the established parent state of which the unrecognized state is legally part. By engaging with unrecognized states for mutual benefit, recognized states also risk supporting the aims of ethnic separatists and would-be breakaway minorities, creating fertile ground for further ethno-political conflict and regional instability. The importance of the resource question, therefore, is one which, we contend, should be factored into any theoretical understanding of the development of unrecognized states, whether they turn into independent states or find an expedient form of accommodation within the broader contested frameworks of international society.

Exploring the Causal Continuum

Conceptual Literature

The term ‘unrecognized state’ does not represent or embody a conceptual consensus.⁸ Since the late 1990s, unrecognized states have assumed a range of conceptual guises, with most of them being driven by the need to rationalize conflicts and territorial revisions which occurred in the space previously occupied by the Soviet Union. Foremost among these is the ‘de facto state’, a term coined by Pegg (1998) in his studies of Eritrea before independence, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, and Tamil Eelam, and who defined this political unit as ‘a secessionist entity that receives popular support and has achieved sufficient capacity to provide governmental services to a given population in a defined territorial area, over which it maintains effective control for an extended period of time’. An interesting feature of Pegg’s definition is its focus on secession as the primary causal dynamic preceding the emergence of the de facto state, rather than criteria of status in international law, which run parallel within his analysis as a reinforcement of his conceptualization of the ‘secessionist entity’. By Pegg’s definition, the de facto state is a secessionist entity, which explains why it was logical for the concept to be adopted for analysis of the breakaway republics that formed in Eurasia and the Caucasus following the decline of the Soviet Union.⁹

In his analysis of post-Soviet conditions, King referred to ‘unrecognized states’, ‘de facto countries’, ‘de facto states’, ‘independent statelike entities’, ‘unrecognized regimes’, ‘separatists’, ‘surreptitious state building’ and a wealth of other conceptual forms and dynamics in his article ‘The Benefits of Ethnic War: Understanding Eurasia’s Unrecognized States’ (2001: 524–52). King’s analysis provided a temporal framework for understanding the emergence of such entities by acknowledging a continuum of state weakness, external support, cultural legitimization, complicity of central governments, and the sometimes ‘unwitting’ assistance of international negotiators as potent dynamics surrounding the evolution of unrecognized states in the post-Soviet space (ibid.: 535). Importantly, King’s analysis did not introduce new theoretical and conceptual abstractions to the concept of the unrecognized state, seeking instead to emphasize the expedient strategies pursued by armed groups and other actors operating within these entities, as well as those ‘complex economic incentives’ (ibid.: 524) which sustained conflict and subsequently enabled state-building and a political economy of de facto independence to emerge in the cases of Nagorno Karabakh, Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia.

Again viewing events in post-Soviet space, but with a more prescriptive tone, Dov Lynch’s book Engaging Eurasia’s Separatist States (2004a) used the terms ‘separatist state’ and ‘de facto state’ interchangeably to explore a wide range of existential problems concerning post-Soviet unrecognized states, the conflicts from which they emerged, and future dialogue these entities could have with international society.¹⁰ In the same year, the concept of the de facto state was re-internationalized with a greater level of generality in the co-edited work by Bahcheli, Bartmann, and Srebrnik entitled De Facto States: The Quest for Sovereignty (2004). This volume presented a diverse range of case material and forwarded a world view comprised of ‘distinct nationalities and, as such, “states in waiting” ’ (ibid.: 246).¹¹ With the experience of the emergence of new states in the space previously occupied by the Soviet Union, and the collapse of the former Yugoslavia still very much in the minds of many, this world view of ‘states in waiting’ fitted neatly with the patterns and processes that had become, if not commonplace, then relatively unsurprising when they emerged. With the bulk of literary output during this period emphasizing the existence of unrecognized ‘states in waiting’ or separatist ‘states in all but name’, a particularly abstract state-centric narrative of self-determination – one in which the creation of new states by ethno-nationalists took centre stage – was promoted, despite the problematic praxis accompanying this new conceptual formula for state creation. Whilst many secessionist movements and impulses exist, as far as establishing states is concerned, very few ethno-national secessionist movements (and interest groups within these movements) succeed in fully rolling back the sovereign space(s) occupied by the international legal entity within which they reside to create new, de jure sovereign homelands or fully recognized states. Indeed, the argument that most new states formed over the past thirty years have been the byproduct of fragmentation and wider processes of territorial revision in the international system rather than secession (Hechter 1992: 279–80) remains persuasive, irrespective of the momentum that had built behind the ‘states in all but name’ approach.

This gap between how the problem of unrecognized states was viewed, particularly with reference to the trajectory they would take, as compared with empirical evidence that tended to suggest something quite different, was indicative of a deeper set of definitional problems that had begun to obfuscate the field. The study of unrecognized states had developed in a largely ad hoc manner, jumping from case study to case study, without having developed a terminological consensus aimed at filtering (or standardizing) the widely swinging meanings and nuanced usages which were emerging in the literature. Indeed, the problem was deeper than simply over-utilizing a range of terms inaccurately. The conceptualism contained in the literature seems to progressively work away from standard designations, resulting in a level of terminological confusion which persists to the present. Whether it was a result of reflective disciplinary distance or the absence of discussion and debate between practitioners engaged in the study of unrecognized states, by 2005 a plethora of terms were circulating within the literature. Kolstø’s article ‘The Sustainability and Future of Unrecognized Quasi-States’ (2006) cleverly embodies a concerted attempt at tackling this conundrum. Kolstø argued that the term ‘quasi-states’, previously used by Jackson (1990) to describe recognized states which had failed to develop the necessary infrastructural capacity to function as states yet possess external recognition, should be reserved as a designation for unrecognized, de facto states, given the term’s usage to describe ‘less-than-real statehood’ in other literature. His analysis included the proposition that ‘if any of the unrecognized quasi-states of today’s world should succeed in achieving international recognition, most of them will end up not as “normal” or fully fledged states but instead transmute into recognized quasi-states of the Jacksonian variety’ (Kolstø 2006: 723–5).

This attempt to tackle the terminological confusion which developed in the study of unrecognized states defiantly balanced the numerous existing terms used to describe these phenomena by figuring the projection of an uncertain future for ‘quasi-states’ in the appropriated idiom of an existence lacking international recognition. Despite Kolstø’s strong argument for clarification, the proliferation of terminology and new conceptual schema remains a distinc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Conceptualizing Unrecognized States
• 1 Theorizing Unrecognized States
• 2 Complex Terrains
• 3 International Actions and the Making and Unmaking of Unrecognized States
• 4 What Do Unrecognized States Tell Us about Sovereignty?
• Part II The Interactions of the Recognized and the Unrecognized State
• 5 States without Sovereignty
• 6 After the War Ends
• 7 ‘Separatism is the Mother of Terrorism'
• 8 The Foreign Policies of Unrecognized States
• Part III Conflict Management and Unrecognized States
• 9 The Limits of International Conflict Management in the Case of Abkhazia and South Ossetia1
• 10 The Politics of Unrecognized States and the Business of International Peace Mediation
• 11 Reintegrating Unrecognized States
• Appendix: Maps of Unrecognized States
• Bibliography
• Index