Introduction: Independence, global entanglement and the co-production of sovereignty

Abstract

In September 2014 the residents of Scotland went to the polls to decide whether they would remain a part of the United Kingdom or forge a separate course as an independent state. A year later, at the University of St. Andrews, a group of scholars, not only from Scotland but from across the world, met to engage in a broader discussion of independence. The idea for the workshop arose from a number observations regarding the impact of the larger national, regional and international context on the Scottish referendum campaign. The numerous comparisons generated in the global media to other independence campaigns, ranging from Quebec and Catalonia to Kosovo, Tibet, Hong Kong and Kashmir, as well as historically to the United States, Africa or Ireland, among others, were a further inspiration. The scholarly contributions raised conceptual questions about what it means to be ‘independent’ in a deeply entangled global space, comprised of multiple and intersecting legal and political regimes, as well as the political, cultural and constitutional implications of re-imagining these relationships. The wide variety of cases and theoretical approaches together demonstrated that traditional grammars of the right to self-determination are increasingly unable to either understand or respond appropriately to the challenges of state-building and state-fragmentation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This special issue draws on a selection of papers from the interdisciplinary workshop, which related to international law and international relations. While building on broader concerns raised during the workshop, the contributions here focus more explicitly on a question of how intersecting legal regimes, as well as power relations and competing legitimacies at the local, national, regional and international levels, have shaped or inhibited the construction of ‘independence’ in practice as well as the conceptual or theoretical implications of approaching analysis from this angle. It thus brings together two questions posed by the larger workshop. The first regards the constitutional dimensions of independence and partnership, given the intersecting legal regimes involved. The second regards the power dimensions of independence given entanglement in a set of external relationships, which have arisen in very different contexts, from decolonisation to long-standing conflict or, in the case of Scotland, democracy.