Uscire dai confini. Valore e aporie della scelta territoriale

Working against a background of moves for secession, the author considers questions pertaining to the choice of territorial loyalty and the significance of borders. The specific nature of secession resides in its constituting the crisis of all previously consolidated borders and the expression of tension in relation to them, although at the same time it does not appear to be so much a revolutionary as a conservative concept, as it does not oblige the classical concepts relative to the nature and structure of the state to be reappraised. The author then relates the commonest meaning of secession (the separation of a concentrated group of territories from a sovereign state) to individual forms of secession. In the process, she notes on the one hand how both forms of secession are still expressions of the constant (and at times dramatic) significance of borders and of their material substance and, at same time, how they both tend to deprive the fixed, stable nature of borders (the very foundation of the international community) of all their sanctity. On the other hand, she also notes that, while collective secession is relegated to the margins of rationality, as it contradicts the sovereign demarcation of spatial relations treated systematically by the international law of state borders, the individual right of secession (i.e. the right to migrate) premises the dissolution of sovereign political identities, obliging every kind of state organisation, national space and community thinking to be reappraised.;

Costanza Margiotta, Uscire dai confini. Valore e aporie della scelta territoriale in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 3/2006, pp 35-44, DOI: