A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• What is the Democratic Approach to Plebiscitary Secessionism?

  2019. Jouni Reinikainen. Ethnopolitics 18 (4), 362-378

  Article

  The past decades have witnessed an upsurge for a 'plebiscitary' variety of secessionism that primarily is motivated by the strong will for independence that a separatist minority gives voice to in a referendum. In this paper, I examine the answers that four approaches to secession offer to what the democratic way of meeting this form of secessionism would be. I make two points. The first is that our understandings of what would be democratic in this context are determined by our understandings of legitimacy. There is actually no objectively most democratic way to approach plebiscitary secessionism. There are only more or less adequate ways of using democracy from the point of view of legitimacy. My second point is that the legitimacy of a state's authority normally presupposes that the subjects of a state have a possibility to exit their state by way of secession. The adequate use of democracy in cases of plebiscitary secessionism is therefore to treat secession as form of exit and to design an independence referendum as a scan of the choice of the exit option.

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• Popular Sovereignty, Globalization and Political Rights

  2016. Ludvig Beckman, Ulf Mörkenstam, Jouni Reinikainen. Portuguese Journal of Political Science (6), 155-178

  Article

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• Initial Citizenship and Rectificatory Secession

  2012. Jouni Reinikainen. Territories of Citizenship, 146-169

  Chapter

  Secessions that are justified by rectificatory justice — that is, by the fact that they rectify a previous unjust incorporation into another state — very often seem to confront us with a moral dilemma when it comes to the delimitation of the initial citizenry. In non-rectificatory secessions, all legal residents of a seceding unit have legitimate expectations to retain the equal citizenship status that they possessed in the old state. This means that the unconditional inclusion of all inhabitants becomes a requirement of justice. However, what justice requires in the delimitation of the initial citizenry seems more uncertain if the seceding unit has first been unjustly incorporated into another state and then also subjected to settlement of new residents from the incorporating state during the period of incorporation. This is the situation that the Baltic States faced in 1991 and — to some extent — that East Timor experienced in 2002. Moreover, it is a situation that Palestine, Tibet, and Western Sahara would also face if those political units would become independent states in the future. The question called forth in these cases is if justice really requires the unconditional inclusion of all legal residents in the initial citizenry or if the rectification of the injustice does not, in fact, require the exclusion of the settlers.

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Show all publications by Jouni Erik Reinikainen at Stockholm University