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89 Nordic J. Int'l L. 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/nordic89 and id is 1 raw text is: NORDIC NORDIC JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURAL BRILL 89 (2020) 1-37 LAW N IJ H O F F brillcom/nord Waiting for Abkhazia: Secession and Borders as International Legal Instruments in Contested Sovereignty Shorena Nikoleishvili Faculty of Law, University of Turku, FI-2052o Turku, Finland shonik@utufi Abstract The article explores the contested claims for sovereignty of Abkhazia through the lens of secession. It maps the evolution of the law on secession from the early 20th century to the present, with an attempt to find a doctrinal fit to the claims of Abkhazian seces- sion from Georgia. The article suggests that rather than reflecting any of the existing modalities for legal or legitimate secession, Abkhazia together with other cases stem- ming from the post-Soviet space constitute a sui generis modality for secession. The article argues that this modality has a particularly tragic outcome for all of its partici- pants, sentencing the secessionist regions in the post-Soviet space to a permanent state of flux. Keywords secession - borders - international law - territory - minorities - Georgia - Abkhazia i Introduction At the turn of the millennium, the question of democratic secession sur- faced through the calls for independence for Quebec,1 and while it would be an 1 I would like to thank James Summers for inviting me to a conference many years ago to present a shell of an idea and providing valuable feedback, and to Toni Selkala for reading through the final manuscript. The usual disclaimer applies. Reference re Secession of Quebec, 20 August 1998, Supreme Court of Canada, <scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/ 1643/index.do>, visited on 8 August 2019; F. Mendez and M. Germann,'Contested Sovereignty: © KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2020 1 DOI:10.1163/15718107-BJA10001