title: When is secession legitimate?
abstract: &lt;p&gt;Secession claims are not sufficiently dealt with at international law. Similarly theoretical analyses of the moral justifications for secession widely differ, with little scholarly agreement on, for example, whether there is a primary right to secede, a remedial right only, or no right to secede at all. This paper reviews the scholarly debate on legal, moral and constitutional legitimacy of secession, and develops five criteria for assessing the overall legitimacy of a secession claim: 