Examinations of partially sovereign de facto states resulting from territorial secession have grown into a lucrative field of study in recent years. What once seemed a niche area of research that focused on a handful of statelets in far-off regions of the former Soviet Union has evolved into a series of developed topics including concepts of sovereignty, security studies, conflict resolution, and regionalism. Additionally, the family of de facto, unrecognized, quasi, and contested states has grown to include long-standing frozen conflicts like Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara, and the State of Palestine. Arguably, the study of disputed territories gained considerable academic attention with Kosovo in 2008 and the nearly three-decade-long struggle for self-determination by its ethnic Albanian community. It is both within this expanding field of study and the specifics associated with the disintegration of Yugoslavia that Argyro Karstonaki’s Breaking Away offers a critical study on the nature of unilateral secession and the current status of Kosovo, which has become the Aristotelian model of a territorial unit that has managed to secede from its parent state, but has been unable to transition into a fully recognized sovereign state of its own, and remains a frozen conflict.

Most disputed territories in the world today are the result of unilateral secession: the creation of “a new state on a territory previously belonging to an existing state, without the consent of the latter” (xvi). The problem is that the territory still, in some way, “belongs” to the parent state according to its supporters and through various international legal arguments. That is why opponents to unilateral secession still uphold the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the primary state, while those who currently control it are seen as “occupiers.” This is the reason why unilateral secessions are mostly “doomed to fail,” as Kartsonaki rightly observes (xv). Because the founding of these statelets takes place outside any unified and coordinated international arrangement, the parent state still possesses leverage in holding all legal claims to the territory, along with any asset contained within, even if it no longer exerts any real authority there.

Entities like Kosovo, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, and Somaliland are all seen as anomalies that challenge norms of international law, and as such are treated as pariahs of the international community. They are neither afforded recognition nor able to gain membership in the United Nations because a number of powerful states oppose their statehood. Their struggle for independence may be no different, nor any less justified, than dozens of other states in the world today, but the nature of secession that characterized their declaration of independence has stigmatized them as threats to international order and the territorial integrity of existing states.

Yet stigma aside, these entities can successfully secede from their parent state “if it results in the creation of an entity that has achieved external recognition and internal viability to such an extent its secession is irreversible and the continuation of its existence is ensured” (15). External recognition, or at the absolute least dedicated sponsorship and support from an external power, has been noted to be a critically important element in maintaining the existence of a breakaway entity from its parent state. Whether it is Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia or its sponsorship of Transnistria, Armenia’s sponsorship of Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey’s recognition of Northern Cyprus, or the United States’s recognition of Kosovo, this external support provides enough of a diplomatic and, if necessary, military deterrent against any attempts by the parent state in regaining control over lost territory.

Yet according to Kartsonaki, external sponsorship including recognition does little to add to a de facto state’s credibility without the additional presence of “internal viability,” which she defines as “the ability of the government to provide domestic order, effectively ruling over population and territory” (xvii). In so many words, internal viability focuses on the governability of the breakaway entity, which Kartsonaki notes is a condition critical to its long-term survival. Indeed, many disputed territories come with local authorities that control taxation, education, political and civil administration, police, law, and jurisprudence. Northern Cyprus has existed for more than forty years, and Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria for more than twenty five. Kosovo has existed as a separate de facto state for more than a decade but operated under a series of parallel sociopolitical institutions in Yugoslavia for nearly an additional decade prior. All are relatively stable entities with some structurally functioning democratic apparatus defining the nature of government. Even Somaliland has been noted to be comparatively better off than its parent state of Somalia, while Taiwan serves as a rare example of a de facto state with a developed economy on par with any advanced industrial country.

The problem with this association is that internal viability does not increase international recognition, as Kartsonaki seems to imply. This might be because of the criteria she uses to define sovereignty of de facto states. Within the literature on state theory, two models of sovereignty are known. Declarative sovereignty is the more loosely open-ended interpretation of sovereignty than the stricter legally binding constitutive variant. As the name implies, declarative sovereignty occurs when a political body exerts a significant degree of control over a territory and asserts authority over a fixed population with the added ability of entering into relations with other states and international organizations. Its sovereignty can garner recognition from other states, but it is the latter model that guarantees full international recognition and legal entry into the United Nations, which offers a final, ratifying, and in many respects sanctifying, approval on the authority, legitimacy, and constitutional legality of sovereignty.

The differences in declarative and constitutive sovereignty have been noted in existing literature on de facto states. Declarative sovereignty can identify a territory’s secession from a parent state, but says little about whether that secession is regarded as legal in the international context, as well as anything about the entity’s international capabilities and opportunities. As such, without coordinating secession from the parent state, as for example Montenegro did with Serbia, or South Sudan did with northern Sudan, declarative states must rely on support and recognition on a state-by-state basis, with many states choosing not to extend recognition at all due to the stigma the declarative state carries from being founded in direct violation of another state’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

This is where Kartsonaki’s argument becomes somewhat problematic. By opting for the minimal standards of declarative sovereignty to define de facto states, Kartsonaki appears to overestimate Kosovo’s allegedly “successful” secession from Serbia. How successful is it? If we measure success by evaluating whether a territory has managed to institutionally and functionally detach from a preexisting state, then Kosovo is indeed successful; but so are Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Transnistria, and South Ossetia. All of these de facto states can rely on external sponsorship for survival and have developed some functional viability. But if we are to measure secession by whether a breakaway entity has succeeded in becoming an internationally recognized state of its own, with membership in the United Nations and the ability to treat with other countries as a sovereign equal, then none of them, Kosovo included, have met the requirement or are likely to meet that requirement anytime soon.

Kosovo may have largely broken away from Yugoslavia’s, and later Serbia’s, authority, but it still faces a number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It remains heavily dependent on sponsor countries like the United States for diplomatic support. It currently has little to no prospects for entering either the European Union or the United Nations due to opposition by a number of key members. Serbia, its parent state, refuses to recognize its independence, which provides enough of a rationale for other countries to withhold, and more recently rescind, recognition. Kosovo’s internal viability sustains its existence, but produces little by way of a quality of life for the majority of its people. Perhaps most problematic, not just for Kosovo but for similar de facto states, its legal status remains ambiguous due to the opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which, when asked to rule on the legality of its unilateral declaration of independence, stated that there is no applicable law against secession but took no position on whether Kosovo had achieved statehood. Internal viability or not, this decision does nothing for the prospects of Kosovo or any other breakaway entity in achieving formal statehood. If anything, the ICJ ruling kept Kosovo on the map, but with borders that were dotted instead of solid, and with a slightly different shade of color from the state it separated from. These conditions seem hardly an endorsement of successful secession if de jure sovereignty is considered.

Kosovo, however, is nevertheless regarded as a success story among its supporters, who liken it to a normal sovereign state. It is not, Kartsoanki acknowledges. Still, unlike many disputed territories, Kosovo enjoys widespread recognition from about one hundred states. It also enjoys membership in many international organizations, like the World Trade Organization, the International Olympic Committee, and the Union of European Football Associations. Probably most encouraging is that it has signed the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) with the European Union and, at the time of this writing, stands on the threshold of obtaining a much-desired visa liberalization to travel throughout the EU. This places it less among the peripheral post-Soviet de facto states of Karabakh and Abkhazia, and more with declarative states like Taiwan and Palestine. What, then, made Kosovo’s secession from Yugoslavia/Serbia more successful than other de facto statelets? Why do so many scholarly works give Kosovo the benefit of the doubt in assuming both statehood and sovereignty while still regarding other entities as breakaway territories?

The answer seems to be more the importance of international sponsorship and sympathy than any considerations of internal viability. The majority of Kartsonaki’s book provides a superb analysis of events surrounding Kosovo from the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991 to its own unilateral declaration of independence in 2008, but says little about internal viability eliciting international support and recognition. If anything, the decision by the United States and key Western European countries to ultimately support Kosovo’s independence was due to the belief of there being no other alternative to an intractable problem (Chapter 4). To further complicate matters, the decision to support Kosovo’s statehood was founded on visions of a multiethnic democratic state, which had nothing to do with Albanian objectives of separatism based on ethnocentric self-determination in seceding from Yugoslavia by any and all means. In this regard, the type of secession that defined Kosovo’s separation from Yugoslavia had more in common with Abkhazia, Transnistria, and Karabakh, based as it was on nationalism and irredentism. Therefore, independence, which Kosovo Albanians long desired, would be designed, structured, administered, and defined by international actors that would be considerably different from what Albanians actually envisioned and desired.

Within Kartsonaki’s well-described accounts of passive and active resistance employed by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian community against Yugoslavia’s institutional political apparatus, the importance of external support is abundantly clear. When Kosovo’s initial declaration of independence in July 1990 was not recognized by American and European governments, Albanians chose to boycott all political, economic, and social activities as a sort of virtual secession from the state. This boycott was, at the absolute least, tacitly supported by the United States, which seemed to recognize the legitimacy of resistance against a state that systematically denied Albanians political rights and civil liberties. Yet when the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed in 1995 that effectively ended the wars of Yugoslav secession but left out any talks of Kosovo’s future status, boycotts gave way to more active measures of resistance in the form of militant insurgent movements that had the calculated objective of escalating conflict with Serbian communities and Yugoslav/Serbian security forces in order to force the United States, NATO, and any other international actor to directly intervene. This was finally accomplished in 1999 with the expulsion of Yugoslav/Serbian military forces and placing Kosovo as an international protectorate.

Up to this point, internal viability had little, if anything, to do with Kosovo garnering international sympathy and support against Yugoslavia/Serbia. Kosovo remained a dual society between ethnic Serbs loyal to Belgrade and the majority of ethnic Albanians who operated within parallel political institutions and a shadow economy that largely relied on cross-border trade with neighboring Albania and remittances from the Albanian diaspora living abroad. The objective among Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leadership was not to present Kosovo as some oasis of democracy in an otherwise authoritarian Yugoslavia. Rather, political actors like Ibrahim Rugova deftly synthesized the goal of secession with narratives of suffering and oppression under the belligerent government of Slobodan Milošević in order to win them the attention of the United States, which, if it would not initially support outright secession, would at the absolute least recognize their authority and legitimacy against those in Belgrade.

The years following NATO’s intervention followed the same patterns of ethnic Albanians practicing either passive or active resistance against any negotiated settlement over Kosovo’s future that did not support independence from Serbia and in ensuring international support for self-determination. A new problem, however, was that with the removal of Milošević from power in 2000, the international community that had previously defended Kosovo Albanian rights against a government that was widely perceived to be responsible for much of the aggression surrounding Yugoslavia’s disintegration now lost much of its reason to sanction Serbia any longer. Whereas Kosovo once served as useful diplomatic leverage by the West against Milošević in getting him to acquiesce on agreements over resolving conflict in Croatia and Bosnia under threat of empowering the Albanians further, its status in the initial years following NATO’s intervention and Milošević’s removal did not exclusively include independence.

This may explain the reasons for the escalation of violence in March 2004 when ethnic Albanians targeted Serb communities throughout Kosovo, which is largely believed to have produced the necessary “wake-up call” to the international community to “solve” the Kosovo question sooner than later. As indefinite postponements of Kosovo’s status gave way to the apparent need for an immediate solution, and as “standards before status” gave way to statements in Washington that support would be given for declarations of independence, any attempts at finding alternative solutions were simply ignored by ethnic Albanians who believed independence was now a matter of time, and by the United States, which believed independence was a fait accompli.

This brings us back to the original question of this work: when is secession successful, and by extension, is Kosovo an example of a successful secession? Kartsonaki seems to believe it is, but the evidence he presents and the diplomatic impasse Kosovo has found itself in for more than a decade indicate otherwise. Kosovo’s secession is “successful” insofar as it has largely separated from Serbia and functions as a de facto state. It is also “successful” in that it enjoys widespread support among most Western European and North American democracies. When compared with other disputed territories, Kosovo certainly enjoys a number of advantages. But further analysis by Kartsonaki reveals that even the limited sovereignty Kosovo enjoys comes with lots of fine print.

First, and probably most importantly, the vision of independence for which Kosovo’s international supporters advocated calls for a multiethnic state built on consociational power-sharing with its small, but disproportionately empowered, Serbian minority. This was never envisioned by Kosovo’s Albanian secessionists, who only saw Kosovo as a future ethnic-Albanian state, either independent to pursue its own policies or eventually to be annexed with Albania. The years following Kosovo’s declaration of independence have not just been challenged by diplomatic obstacles from Serbia but also by Kosovo Albanian officials who need constant pressure to uphold constitutional rights for an ethnic minority historically considered unwanted and disenfranchised.

This raises questions about Kosovo’s alleged “internal viability,” which Karstonaki never critically analyzes beyond mentioning it in the Introduction and Conclusion. Internal viability neither led to international support for Kosovo’s declaration of sovereignty, nor has it arguably served to win additional recognitions since 2008. Based on the information provided in the middle chapters, it is not internal viability that accumulates external support, but rather external support that designs, shapes, and pushes for the implementation of internal viability. Kartsonaki effectively mentions this at the end of chapter 6 when noting the close connection internal viability has with international support to make it seem like viability is imposed. Kosovo’s road to disputed statehood was largely driven by US foreign policy. Its constitution is largely written to reflect international expectations and standards of democracy and pluralism. Immediate recognitions in early 2008 came after Washington stated its commitment to independence. Additional recognitions since have come from American lobbying and financial incentives. All of these points challenge arguments of Kosovo’s sovereignty and instead make it into a “ward state” of its international backers (104). If internal viability increases the likelihood of a de facto state gaining international sovereignty, Taiwan, Northern Cyprus, Nagorno-Karabakh, and even Somaliland would have more international support for legal sovereignty than they currently do.

Third, the number of recognitions a de facto state possesses ultimately does not do anything to advance its progress toward international sovereignty. Kartsonaki briefly mentions the importance of “quality recognitions,” meaning “support from influential countries,” in promoting international acceptance for a disputed territory (xviii, 8–9). In many respects, Washington always held the fate of Kosovo’s status within its own strategic interests. At any time throughout the 1990s or 2000s, it could not only have openly opposed Kosovo’s secession, but also predicated all future international support on the ethnic Albanian community re-engaging in Serbia’s political institutions as an empowered minority, which was the policy it pursued toward the ethnic Albanians of North Macedonia, who attempted to initiate an uprising in similar fashion to Kosovo in 2001. But even the quality recognition from Washington has not been enough to advance Kosovo’s disputed status toward constitutive sovereignty needed for de jure statehood.

If all that matters is gaining at least one “quality recognition” to ensure secession, then Kosovo’s fortunes are no different from other de facto states. The prospects of either Abkhazia or South Ossetia returning to Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh returning to Azerbaijan, or even Northern Cyprus reunifying with Cyprus are as likely as Kosovo returning to Serbia. By this alone, are all these examples of successful secession? The only difference with Kosovo is that sponsorship comes from a coalition of Western democracies instead of powerful, yet comparatively isolated, players in the international arena. It might have been fruitful for Kartsonaki to extend the final concluding chapter to offer some sort of comparative analysis of these other de facto states in explaining why they have not been afforded the same degree of support from the international community as Kosovo. Perhaps the answer can simply be inferred: key powers like the United States simply choose not to support breakaway entities if they cannot capitalize on their sovereignty.

Kartsonaki’s conclusion regarding Kosovo’s internal viability seems overly optimistic. Its ongoing negotiations with Serbia may be focused on “normalizing” relations, but there has yet to be any official policy from either the EU or the UN that Serbia needs to extend recognition, as Kartsonaki seems to imply. Kosovo continues to face severe shortcomings in areas of rule of law, combatting corruption, and upholding minority rights (101). This raises serious questions about how internally viable Kosovo really is, despite receiving carte blanche support from Western democracies for nearly two decades. Additional recognitions have not adequately improved Kosovo’s internal viability either. Granted, wide-scale violence has ceased, and Serbs are beginning to participate in Kosovo’s political system. But ethnic discrimination, attacks on Serb property, and local harassment of Serb communities still exist, while constitutional provisions for minority rights for Serbs still need to be pushed by the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations. Additionally, Kartsonaki offers no explanation for how Kosovo might enter the UN without Serbia’s recognition, choosing as he does to admit it is extremely difficult “although not impossible” (111). With no way of ending the diplomatic impasse, Kosovo’s declarative sovereignty will remain a frozen conflict.

Kartsonaki has noted these uphill battles for Kosovo, but chose to end her work with an element of guarded optimism. Previous studies on Kosovo are inclined to do this, perhaps out of hope that an entity they already recognize as independent will one day take its place among the community of nations. Yet the thorough analysis the author provides on the nature of Kosovo’s secession from Yugoslavia/Serbia, and the reliance it continues to have on its international sponsors, gives one little hope its prospects will improve beyond its current status. By defining a successful secession as simply detaching from an existing state without the extra requirements for acquiring uncontested sovereignty, Karstonaki has indirectly affirmed Kosovo not as a state, but a disputed de facto state heavily reliant on international sponsorship. If just getting on the map is all that matters, then Kosovo, along with half a dozen other territorial entities, have in fact succeeded in their mission. If getting into the UN, where de jure sovereignty is regarded as the ultimate prize, then Kosovo and others like it have little chances of improving their fortunes, given the nature of their founding. After careful analysis of Kartsonaki’s work, the simple answer to what makes a secession successful may very well be good old fashioned 19th-century-era Great Power politics.