Philip Roeder is one of the leading scholars studying secessionist movements, and he has been at the forefront of this research for many decades. In his previous work, he emphasized that ethnic minorities whose leaders control a substate—a province, for example—are more prone to develop secessionist movements because they have the institutional resources to do so. This often leads to violent confrontations with the center, and many new nation-states originate from such movements (Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism, 2007). Roeder’s new book builds on these insights but also takes the analysis in a new direction. Overall, I find the theory proposed in National Secession exciting and promising, but was somewhat disappointed by how it was empirically specified and tested.

The theory moves away from structuralist accounts that dominate the study of secessionist movements. Previous scholarship related these movements to memories of previous independent statehood, to political exclusion from central-level government, to geographic settlement patterns, and so on. Instead, Roeder’s theory focuses on the leadership of secessionist movements and their strategic decisions. Taking as a model Lenin’s advice on how to build a successful revolutionary movement, Roeder outlines the challenges that secessionist leaders face and how best to overcome them. Most importantly, they must convince rank-and-file members of a would-be nation that their national identity is indeed the most salient form of collective identification, that the current lack of independence has negative consequences for all of them, and so forth. Propaganda that links many different individual concerns, including material ones, to the problem of political dependency and promises a bright future in a new nation-state is therefore crucial. Too close an association with the concerns of a particular group of co-nationals is to be avoided, and strict ideological linkages between national independence and as many grievances as possible need to be established, thus building a large coalition centered around the nationalist agenda. Leaders also must recruit a group of dedicated cadres who are willing to sacrifice their lives to the cause and can endure and survive harsh setbacks. They need to keep the movement united and avoid defections and factionalism by providing or promising incentives, both ideological and material. Finally, leaders must encourage, channel, and at the same time control activists who take pleasure in marching in protest, attacking police officers, or throwing bombs. For Roeder, skilled leadership that excels in these three tasks is the sine qua non in getting an independence project off the ground and pushing it onto the national and international political agenda.

Focusing on the post-1945 world, he shows that most independence movements did not achieve their goal by prevailing on the battlefield. Much more often, they were able to create a new nation-state with the help of international (mostly Western) support or because the central government collapsed (as was the case in the Soviet Union) or was simply no longer interested in dealing with an annoying independence movement (leading to the independence of Singapore and Slovakia). Because independence leaders know this history, they keep their campaigns alive even when they have minimal chances to win the armed battle, waiting for an opportunity to arise that will allow them to declare and maintain independence. Violence is therefore more often symbolic, meant to encourage supporters by providing examples of heroic dedication rather than to actually win the battle militarily. Because state sovereignty is a zero-sum-game, which reduces the inclination of central elites to compromise, most of these conflicts then become entrenched, difficult to solve, and very long-lasting.

Roeder’s focus on leadership represents a bold and innovative move in a literature that is very heavily tilted toward macro-structuralist accounts (as is perhaps characteristic of political science in general, but see James Read and Ian Shapiro, “Transforming Power Relationships: Leadership, Risk, and Hope,” American Political Science Review 108 [1], 2014). I wish, however, that Roeder had connected his arguments to the vast literature on social movements in political sociology, where many scholars have worked on similar problems; for example, “frame resonance” was identified as a crucial mechanism to understand how movement propaganda works (see David Snow and Robert Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,” International Social Movement Research 1[1], 1998). Still, introducing a convincing and consistent theoretical case in favor of the leadership argument—which could easily be extended to cover all kinds of revolutionary movements, not just nationalist and secessionist ones—represents a major and lasting achievement.

Empirically, the book uses standard techniques to show, in a first step, which ethnic groups (among the ca. 1,500 in Roeder’s dataset) develop independence campaigns that become well known enough for English-speaking newspapers to take notice of them. In a second step, Roeder investigates which of these noticeable independence movements are particularly violent over longer periods of time. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the actual empirical design does not in fact test the core Leninist theory. There are no variables about leadership quality, strategy, and propaganda to show that leadership indeed makes a difference. The core tenets of Roeder’s new theoretical argument therefore remain largely untested.

Instead, the argument takes a surprising turn in a realist direction: whether noticeable independence campaigns develop, Roeder argues, depends on the plausibility of the national project, which is conceived as objectively given, rather than as the result of the ideological work of movement leaders. If organized around an already well-established ethnic identity, nationalist aspirations will appear more legitimate; if the ethnic group has a clearly identifiable homeland that could become a state of its own, it appears more feasible; if the ethnic group enjoyed independent statehood in the past, it seems more plausible to imagine regaining it in the future; if the ethnic group is excluded from national-level government and from the nationalist narrative of the center, rank-and-file members will trust that their leaders will stick to the ethnonationalist program.

To be sure, all of these factors are known from the existing literature to affect the probability of secession, so there is actually no news here from a strictly empirical point of view. Roeder simply folds these factors, many of which have been highlighted by authors pursuing different theoretical arguments, into his theory of nationalist mobilization without discussing whether his interpretation actually makes more sense than those offered by other authors. For example, exclusion from national-level political power can affect rank-and-file members of an ethnic group in negative ways, such as with regard to the provision of public goods (as a lengthy literature has shown). Furthermore, in the age of nationalism and the expectations that it shapes, the lack of political representation is a source of grievance in itself. The mechanism linking political exclusion to secession could therefore be independent of the leadership’s commitment to the secessionist program and instead may work via the shared self-interests of rank-and-file members of an ethnic community (as argued in my previous work—see Andreas Wimmer, Lars-Erik Cederman, and Brian Min, “Ethnic Politics And Armed Conflict. A Configurational Analysis Of A New Global Dataset,” American Sociological Review 74 [2], 2009). The same could be said about most of the other variables that Roeder uses to test the plausibility of his argument: territorial concentration not only increases the legitimacy of secessionist demands but also offers many organizational advantages that make a movement more capable of challenging the sovereignty claims of the center, as argued by Monica Toft (The Geography of Ethnic Violence, 2003). Deeply rooted and widely embraced ethnic identities could be associated with specific policy preferences (Evan S. Lieberman and Gwyneth C. H. McClendon, “The Ethnicity-Policy Preference link in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Comparative Political Studies 46 [5], 2013), which in turn can increase the chances of political conflict and violence without much involvement of ethnopolitical leaders.

Overall, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of secessionist movements by highlighting the possible role of leadership and propaganda and offering a consistent theoretical account of the many ways in which these often-overlooked factors could indeed matter. It is written in a highly accessible way, enriched by Roeder’s unprecedented mastery of individual cases. I hope that it will be followed up by a more direct test of its basic propositions.