Greed, Grievance and Violent Separatism in South Asia

Abstract

‘Separatism’ is the advocacy by a sub-group (usually a minority) within a state for a measure of political, social or economic autonomy. It is a matter of degree, rather than a binary (all-or-nothing) feature, consisting in a range of positions along a continuum of special benefits, privileges, entitlements and rights that bestow varying degrees of autonomy from the state’s authority (Wood, 1981; Pavkovic and Cabestan, 2013). In this chapter I shall be concerned with the position at the extreme end of this spectrum — secession — where the state’s geographical borders are re-drawn to exclude a portion of territory from its sovereignty thereby granting to the territory’s inhabitants the maximum degree of autonomy. More specifically, my concern will be to examine the foundations of some of South Asia’s more intractable and destructive secessionist wars within the framework of two types of explanatory theory that attribute the causes of secession to rational self-interest (greed) and injustice (grievance). Nonetheless, despite this focus, I shall continue to refer to these conflicts as ‘separatist’ rather than ‘secessionist’ due to the impracticality of a clear distinction between the two; not only do many secessionist groups start as separatist by pursuing lesser forms of autonomy than independent statehood (subsequently becoming secessionist as these demands are violently rebuffed), but many separatist groups employ the demand to secede as a bargaining tool to achieve lesser goals.