Abstract
In world politics the most important events are often rare events. Secession is a rare and important event. Secession of the center; when the dominant region of a country abandons its peripheries, is even rarer. But as the transformation of the Soviet Union into Russia and a collection of independent states demonstrates, it is an important kind of development. In this paper we illustrate the ambitious use of an agent-based virtualization model of Pakistan. By producing a large number of futures of the country, modeled according to best available data and theory, secession of the center--the emergence of Punjabistan--is shown to be rare although possible. Analysis of the trajectories leading toward that outcome suggests how it could come about; or be prevented.
Highlights
As is well known, the final collapse of the Soviet Union along the lines of its national republics in 1991 took Soviet specialists largely by surprise
By the summer of 1993, analysts of post-Soviet politics began to discuss the possibility that the fate of the USSR might soon await Russia itself (Sheehy, 1993)
Advocates of secession found themselves opposed by central authorities who vacillated between accommodationist and coercive strategies for holding the state together, increasing the general uncertainty about the limits of Moscow’s tolerance of republican or regional autonomy
Summary
The final collapse of the Soviet Union along the lines of its national republics in 1991 took Soviet specialists largely by surprise. For a country like Tajikistan, proximity to international borders has been a security curse rather than an economic blessing—a concern about full independence that has been raised in the otherwise restive regions of the Russian Far East Perhaps reasons such as these explain why Treisman (1997) found no correlation whatsoever between geographical placement and secessionist activity among ethnic republics in the Russian Federation. No doubt the mass perception at the time was that independence would increase, rather than decrease, national wealth—but the explanation for secessionism must turn on subjective (and incorrect) popular evaluations rather than objective economic calculations If it is true, as may well be the case, that Russian regions today don’t perceive the same economic advantages to full secession from the center that were commonly anticipated among Soviet republics in 1990-1991, it is not because their objective economic positions are ostensibly all that different. Such an argument begs the question, of just why “tastes” of this sort emerge where and when they do
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