Ricerc@Sapienza

Both the developed and developing world are experiencing, albeit often for different reasons, secessionist movements (Alberta, French Basque Country, Italian irredentism, Nagorno-Karabakh, Somaliland, Zapatista, etc.). Closely connected to the topical issue of secession, but underexplored, is state formation. Indeed, when successful, secession leads to the formation of a new state. Novel state formation is a process which can occur through a shift in the boundaries of another state -- i.e., through internal exit -- when certain exogenous circumstances are concurrently present (ecology, population density, institutional constraints, and limits to the broadcast of power).

The exogenous circumstances create a rent-seeking window that leads to two opposite economic forces putting pressure on state scope: the attempt of an existing state to maintain its population and the attempt of a subset of the state's population to form a new state. We intend to characterize these forces through a factually-grounded political economy approach to state formation through internal exit that allows the derivation of novel conditions for state boundary determination. The setting is southern Africa, circa 1500-1910, where autochthonous states formed by fission.

The project is thus mainly in the nature of an analytic narrative, which draws inspiration from southern Africa state formation. As such, we expect its insights to be valuable for other contexts too. Moreover, the project is closely connected to recent global populist movements that advocate closure of state boundaries. These are so-called nativist policies where competition for political support over tax rates is shifting toward competition for political support over the degree of economic openness of boundaries (e.g., Italy, UK). We anticipate our project to yield empirical implications for these and similar global challenges as well as topical policy lessons.