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Imagining Sovereignty, Managing Secession: The Legal Geography Of Eurasia's "Frozen Conflicts", Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

The interrelated concepts of sovereignty, self-determination, and the territorial integrity of states form a Gordian knot at the core of public international law. These concepts encompass not only how we define the classic actors of the international system—states—but also how seriously international law takes claims of civil and political rights. This Article considers how geographic concepts can be used to try to untangle—or slice through this knot of issues.

The frozen conflicts of Eurasia are a series of ongoing secessionist crises in the post-Soviet states of Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. I will use the example of the so-called "frozen conflict" …