Secession and the right to non-intervention

In this dissertation, I address the question of how third party states should respond to secessionist struggles. I argue that third party states should support a seceding territory against the parent state only if the parent state has failed to meet minimum requirements of justice or legitimacy. This understanding of the right to secede is grounded in the right of a parent state to non-intervention. I argue that whether a state has the right to non-intervention depends on its record of respecting basic human rights. A state has this right if it can justify to third party states its claim to have the moral authority to govern its population.;The tension that arises for third party states deciding how to respond to an attempted secession flows from the potential conflict between requirements of justice and requirements of legitimacy. It may be impossible to be fair to all groups affected by a secessionist struggle without slowing progress toward a more just world. I argue that accounts of international obligations that begin with utopian accounts of a new cosmopolitanism are problematic. It is not the case that whatever action brings such utopian visions closer to fruition most quickly is therefore obligatory. Instead, I focus on the need to generate consensus on core human rights, and build standards of recognition on this foundation. Moreover, I argue that accepting the lack of consensus on a comprehensive conception of justice should not be understood as a moral failure. Liberals can instantiate the core principles of liberalism better if they refrain from imposing their conception of justice on non-liberal states, and instead focus their efforts on generating consensus on international standards that can be endorsed from a wide range of reasonable perspectives. The need to treat different groups fairly during the transition to greater justice constrains how third party states may legitimately respond to secessionist struggles. This constraint is an application of the liberal value of tolerance in the context of international justice.