Anthropologists have a long tradition of studying politics through its vernacular understandings and everyday dynamics. Rather than taking the formal institutional architecture of democratic politics as their central vantage point, they explore the meaning that political processes may assume and the ritualistic and symbolic dimensions they may have.

Most states have outlawed separatism, and yet the origin of the state itself has a problematic relationship with the law. Many critical law scholars have reflected on this conundrum by rethinking the foundations and boundaries of law.

Both IR scholars and geographers have interrogated the power invested in the way states are projected and understood. Feminist and de-colonial perpectives have unsettled the self-evident nature of established states to facilitate alternative ways of conceptualising politics and state conduct.

Alongside these disciplinary orientations, our project builds on the existing scholarship on rebel governance (the governing practices or insurgent movements) and de facto states (self-declared sovereign states with limited or no international recognition).

Finally, there is some work – scattered across disciplines and diverse case contexts – that adopts an approach of studying separatist politics (and cognate phenomena) with a performative lens. This is the scholarship that we draw on most closely in this project.