Security and Secession: Rich-Country Separatism in a Secure World

This paper seeks to contribute to the existing literature on substate actors by investigating the causes of substate resistance in wealthy states and orienting such analysis around the literature on state formation and public goods theory. Given the relative recency of a world without great power competition that may organize states along insecure lines of counterbalancing, the examples of highly-mobilized wealthy country separatists are few. This paper analyzes the most prominent and most successful: Quebec, Scotland and Catalonia.