Ethnic Autonomy as a Dual-Use Technology: Successful Secession under Conditions of Civil War and Peace

Abstract

Scholars have argued that autonomy, federalism, and other forms of territorial self-governance for ethnic groups are both a successful tool to manage ethnic conflict and a Trojan horse that leads to separatism. This paper contributes to the debate by identifying autonomy as a dual-use technology: under conditions of peace, autonomy acts to maintain a unified state; under large-scale political violence (civil war), autonomy increases the probability of an ethnic group's region emerging as an independent state. I present a cross-national, statistical test of this theory during the post-1945 period.