Schar School professor Ahsan Butt was hosted at the Stimson Center, where he also serves as a Nonresident Fellow, to discuss his recently published book, Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy Against Separatists. In his book, Butt makes an argument that states often negotiate separatist movements’ demands, even independence, based on external security factors and not internal security factors as conventional wisdom suggests. Further, the states control the degree to which conflicts will become violent. He investigates the strategies, ranging from negotiated concessions to large-scale repression, adopted by states in response to separatist movements.
Butt’s analysis focuses on two main cases—Pakistani reactions to Bengali and Baloch demands for independence in the 1970s and India’s responses to secessionist movements in Kashmir, Punjab, and Assam in the 1980s and 1990s.