Boxing Pandora: Rethinking Borders, States, and Secession in a Democratic World

by Timothy William Waters

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.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published January 7, 2020

About the author

Timothy William Waters is Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he teaches international and comparative law. He earned a BA from UCLA, a Masters in international affairs from Columbia, and a JD from Harvard. Professor Waters previously worked at the ICTY, where he helped draft the Kosovo indictment of Milosevic. He has also worked with the Open Society Institute, Human Rights Watch, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on issues relating to the former Yugoslavia. He regularly contributes commentary to major print and online media, including the New York Times and Foreign Policy, and is a member of the advisory board of Nationalities Papers.

Reviews

[Carlos · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book as a whole makes an interesting argument, but the order and length of its discussions lessen its effectiveness. Waters wants to convince the reader of the necessity of a universal right to secession. He starts by charting out, in too much detail, how international borders came to be mostly fixed and what the odd exceptions can tell us about how international borders are seen. He then explains how his proposed right would work, again in a lot of detail, enumerating the democratic, territorial, and other feasible aspects. It is only at this point that he acknowledges the incredibly uphill climb to make any sovereign state enforce this right. To his credit, Waters does have reasonable answers to all the objections. However, the decision to leave all discussion of overcoming the immediate and visceral resistance towards this new right to the very end of the book makes the reader wade their way through a mountain of legalistic arguments while they remain unconvinced of the mere plausibility of the right being adopted. Perhaps Waters believed that readers would be content to muse about the theoretical benefit of this right, unbothered by its application. Those readers will find the book much more interesting than those waiting to see Waters defend the obvious objections to this idea.

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The very fact of a right to secession with a robust mechanism alters the negotiating dynamic between states and their own populations; that should lead to more favorable outcomes even for communities that choose to stay. The right is independence, the mechanism is the plebiscite, but the outcome, often, will be better negotiations about the reasons to stay.

An international order that commands us to fear and avoid any change, no matter how unjust or cruel the present situation, misunderstands human nature and the nature of politics: Change is inevitable, it is always happening. The most implausible quality of the current rule is its rigidity, its attempt to freeze the map of the world, as if the world were not in a continuous tumult. That is the sign of our decadence - not that change isn't happening, but that we are incapable of responding to it.

'... for readiness to fight to prevent change is just as unmoral as readiness to fight to enforce it. To establish methods of peaceful change is therefore the fundamental problem of international morality and of international politics.' E.H. Carr '