Dividing Divided States. Gregory F. Treverton

3 turns to the question of pastoralists. This issue was crucial in the case of South Sudan but may not be relevant in regions of the world other than Africa. Yet it will arise in some form in other secessions as well, all the more so as climate change lengthens the migrations of pastoralists.

      The natural resource issues begin with oil and accompanying infrastructure. Resources are a curse in secession because they are not distributed evenly across the original and would-be seceding state. Oil and gas are a special problem for two reasons, and Chapter 4 examines both of them. One is that while the resource pools are fixed in space, those pools may straddle the boundaries of new states. Second, oil and gas need to be moved toward market through expensive infrastructure, infrastructure that may pass through what becomes with division another country.

      Chapter 5 takes up a rather different oil (and other natural resource issue): how to avoid the “resource curse.” At best, resource earnings can distort economic development in the short run; at worst, they can become something to fight over. In the long run, there is concern over equity across generations: how can future generations benefit even after the oil reserves are exhausted? The chapter discusses a variety of funds nations have created, both to smooth out revenue fluctuations when resource prices change and to preserve resource wealth for future generations.

      The next chapter discusses the challenges that arise when secession produces new claimant(s) on existing water resources, most often river basins. That requires negotiating shares, along with ways to enforce them and handle disputes.

      Chapter 7 turns from natural resources to national ones. Dividing assets and liabilities between an old, diminished state and a new, perhaps jubilant one will surely be an emotional issue. Many fixed assets can fairly be allocated to the (new) state in which they exist, but movable assets will be contested, as will ways to share any existing debt burden, all the more so if a visible fraction of the debt was incurred to finance projects that now seem disproportionately housed in one of the states. Military assets are particularly important, hence contentious.

      Currency, the subject of Chapter 8, seems an easier matter: as a symbol of sovereignty, shouldn’t a new state have its own? That logic is often unstoppable but can be dangerous, for currency is in fact connected to banking and economic policy. Not surprisingly, secession cases among richer countries produced better outcomes on this score.

      The final chapter lays out conclusions. The case study chapters concentrate on the specifics of dealing with the issue in question. Yet looking across the cases and issues also sheds light on the broader, contextual factors that sculpt any secession. The conclusions reflect on those, using the Sudan case as one in point. For instance, sequencing matters—what is important to try to do early and what can be deferred?—and leadership are critical. The leaders of the parties need to have the stature and credibility to do more than issue grand pronouncements; they need to be able to make painful compromises, and make them stick.

      Reframing issues can make them more tractable. Yet, the contextual factors that help most—above all trust and amicable relations—are likely to be in the shortest supply. In that sense, the knowledge that other secessions have handled these issues—and the lessons suggested along the way—can help boost trust.

      Each issue (except citizenship) is treated in a broadly similar way, and each chapter follows a similar structure. Once we decided which issues were important, we looked for cases in which the issue had been handled, well or badly, ideally in cases that ranged across different regions of the world. We present each case using a similar template—first a brief statement of the issue and the outcome; then a longer discussion of the course of the dispute or discussion; then finally an assessment and discussion of the possible lessons from the case. We have also looked across cases for comparisons and lessons.

      As a policy guide, the chapters in this book present the results of the process in a somewhat reverse order. If this were a purely academic book, it would lay out the cases, then present the lessons. Here, though, to make it easy for busy policy-minded readers, we present the lessons that resulted from looking across the cases first, in most cases ending with a table to illustrate those lessons graphically. The cases then follow, and readers who are intrigued or dubious or simply want more can sample the cases as they see fit.

      PART I

      People

      CHAPTER 1

      Citizenship

      The first people issue is citizenship. It is the essence of state sovereignty, for it identifies “us,” and separates “us” from “them.” Thus, if ensuring the safety of refugees is usually the most acute challenge of secession, the most enduring one is creating citizenship processes that will be fair and be regarded as such by all the states involved in the secession.

      For instance, in Sudan at secession, as many as two million southerners were internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in the North. In addition, there were both southerners and northerners who were not IDPs but lived and worked in the other region—southerners who were members of a military joint integrated unit or civil servants in Khartoum, the capital, and northerners who had settled in the South and been resident there for years, owning businesses and property. Thus, it was necessary not just to safeguard the movements of IDPs and others who became refugees with secession and wanted to return to their chosen homeland but also to establish some process by which those who wanted to stay could become, if not citizens, at least permanent residents with some legal protection.

      This chapter proceeds somewhat differently from the others. Rather than laying out specific cases in some detail, it elaborates models, bases, and principles of citizenship, then illustrates them with examples from other nations. Using Sudan as an example, a final section spells out the rights of people who wind up located in the state to which they do not feel allegiances in the immediate aftermath of a formal division.

      Drawing on the experience of other nations, in principle there are three models of citizenship—single citizenship, dual citizenship, and long-term (or permanent) residence without citizenship. The two other main policy choices are the basis for determining citizenship and the principles on which the process ought to be based.

       Models, Bases, and Principles of Citizenship

      There are no universally accepted international norms or standards that compel states’ decisions on citizenship when they divide or fracture. Under international law, states have the authority to establish criteria for citizenship.¹ However, as discussed in more detail in the last section of this chapter, international organizations and institutions have adopted nonbinding declarations concerning citizenship when states divide.² These declarations generally discourage discrimination in determining citizenship in the context of the breakup of a state and advocate providing people who are affected by that breakup with the option to freely choose their future citizenship.³ That duty not to discriminate includes actions not only against individuals but also against their property based on people’s choice of citizenship.⁴ The presumption is that anyone holding the nationality of the predecessor state at the time of division has a right to citizenship in at least one of the resulting states, and that anyone with established residence in the region that secedes will acquire the nationality of the new state.⁵ In general, state principles for citizenship when states divide should “respect, as far as possible, the will of the person concerned,” and provide for a reasonable time in which the choice can be made.⁶ They should also discourage linking the citizenship decision to property rights, and prohibit discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, language, or political opinion.