Partition (politics)

Dubnov and Robson locate partition in the context of post-World War I peacebuilding and the "new conversations surrounding ethnicity, nationhood, and citizenship" that emerged out of it. The post-war agreements, such as the League of Nations mandate system, promoted "a new political language of ethnic separatism as a central aspect of national self-determination, while protecting and disguising continuities and even expansions of French and, especially, British imperial powers.^[3]: 1–2 After World War II, they argue, partition transformed from "an imperial tactic into an organizing principle" of world diplomacy".^[3]: 11

Ranabir Samaddar agrees that partition gained prominence following World War I, particularly with the partition of the Ottoman Empire and the Dissolution of Austria-Hungary, resulting from competing national ambitions. By this point, he argues, ethnicity had become the primary justification of border proposals.^[4]

Scholarship has closely linked partition to violence. Tracing the precedent for the Partition of Ireland in population resettlements across former Ottoman Empire territories and the making of national 'majorities' and 'minorities', Dubnov and Robson emphasise how partitions after Ireland contained proposals to transfer "inconvenient populations in addition to forcible territorial division into separate states," which they note had violent consequences for local actors who were devolved the task of "carving out physically separate political entities on the ground and making them ethnically homogenous".^[3]: 7

T.G. Fraser notes that Britain proposed partition in both Ireland and Palestine as a method of resolving conflict between competing national groups, but in neither case did it end communal violence. Rather, Fraser argues, partition merely gave these conflicts a "new dimension".^[5]

Similarly, A. Dirk Moses asserts partition does not "so much solve minority issues as deposit them into different containers as minority issues reappear in partitioned units", rejecting what he calls "divine cartographies" that seek to "neatly map peoples as naturally emplaced in their homelands" for disregarding the heterogeneous reality of identity in the real world.^{[3]: 258–263}

• historicist – that partition is inevitable, or already in progress
• last resort – that partition should be pursued to avoid the worst outcomes (genocide or large-scale ethnic expulsion), if all other means fail
• cost–benefit – that partition offers a better prospect of conflict reduction than if the existing borders are not changed
• better tomorrow – that partition will reduce current violence and conflict, and that the new more homogenized states will be more stable
• rigorous end – heterogeneity leads to problems, hence homogeneous states should be the goal of any policy^[2]

• national territorial unity will be lost
• bi-nationalism and multi-nationalism are not undesirable
• the impossibility of a just partition
• difficult in deciding how the new border(s) will be drawn
• the likelihood of disorder and violence
• partitioning alone does not lead to the desired homogenization
• security issues arising within the borders of the new states^[2]

Daniel Posner has argued that partitions of diverse communities into homogenous communities is unlikely to solve problems of communal conflict, as the boundary changes will alter the actors' incentives and give rise to new cleavages.^[6] For example, while the Muslim and Hindu cleavages might have been the most salient amid the Indian independence movement, the creation of a religiously homogenous Hindu state (India) and a religiously homogeneous Muslim state (Pakistan) created new social cleavages on lines other than religion in both of those states.^[6] Posner writes that relatively homogenous countries can be more violence-prone than countries with a large number of evenly matched ethnic groups.^[7]

• Separatism
• Secession