ABSTRACT
The classic institutional measures offered by comparative politics in order to achieve the practical accommodation of national pluralism are basically of three types: federalism (in a broad sense, including processes of ‘devolution’, confederations, associated states, etc.), consociationalism and secession. While the first two types of measures have been studied for a number of decades using both theoretical and normative models and the analysis of different empirical cases and comparative analyses, secession has received renewed analytical attention in recent years, especially in plurinational contexts. One consequence of this has been the analytical refinement of the literature on normative theories of secession.
