GV4E3      Half Unit
Conflict and State-Building in Eastern Europe and Eurasia

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course analyses a range of conflict cases in Eastern Europe and Eurasia and provides a theoretically informed assessment and critique of the current debates on the concepts of state-building, self-determination, and secession in these regions. It seeks to explain why some state-building projects and claims to self-determination and secession have succeeded while others are failing or have failed to achieve international recognition, or are otherwise seen as problematical cases. The concepts lie at the intersection of politics and international law, and the focus in this course is on the politics and policies. The first two weeks deal with the conceptual debates and theories and practices in state-building, self-determination, and secession, examining the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia as communist federations, and the associated violent conflicts that followed the collapse. The collapse is located in the Cold War context, and the impact of internal and external ideas about democracy and nationalism on the collapse is explored. The rest of the course examines how the collapse has continued to reverberate across the regions. We use weekly case studies drawn from the former Soviet space and former Yugoslavia. The cases include wars and violent conflicts over self-determination and secession, the management of multiethnicity in state-building, and the role of international institutions and external intervention in managing state-building, self-determination and secession. The cases considered include many of the so-called “frozen conflicts” and several of the wars in the region: Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chechnya, Ukraine/Crimea/Donbas, Georgia/Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabagh, Estonia and Latvia. As an LSE Moodle course, almost all of the weekly readings are available online.

15 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Presentation

Essay (1500 words)

One essay of 1,500 words, to be on a topic that differs from the summative essay. Students must also contribute to a team presentation.

Hurst Hannum, Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights. Rev. ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996; Jörg Fisch, The Right of Self-Determination of Peoples: The Domestication of an Illusion. Cambridge University Press, 2015; Fernando R. Tesón, The Theory of Self-Determination. Cambridge University Press, 2017; Philip G. Roeder and Donald Rothchild eds, Sustainable Peace. Power and Democracy after Civil Wars, Cornell University Press, 2005; Timothy D. Sisk, Statebuilding: Consolidating Peace after Civil War. Polity, 2013; Roland Paris, and Timothy D. Sisk, The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations. Routledge, 2009; James Hughes, Chechnya. From Nationalism to Jihad, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007; James Hughes & Gwendolyn Sasse (Eds), Ethnicity and Territory in the Former Soviet Union, Routledge, 2001; Christoph Zurcher, The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict, and Nationhood in the Caucasus, New York University Press, 2007; David Chandler, Empire in Denial. The Politics of State-Building, Pluto, 2006; Roberto Belloni, State building and international intervention in Bosnia, Routledge, 2007;  Marc Weller, Contested Statehood: Kosovo’s Struggle for Independence. Oxford University Press, 2009; Marc Weller, Settling Self-Determination Disputes: Complex Power-Sharing in Theory and Practice. Nijhoff, 2008; Gwendolyn Sasse, The Crimea Question. Identity, Transition and Conflict, Harvard University Press, 2007.

Essay (100%, 5000 words) in Spring Term Week 1

One essay of 5,000 words, to be submitted early in the Spring Term.