I joined Crisis editor Eric Sammon to discuss secession and my new book Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.
From the discussion: “Secession should really just be thought of as one form of political decentralization. In America, we’re pretty familiar with the idea of decentralization overall. Most people call it federalism. ... Americans get the idea of decentralization overall, but what of course they forget is that America’s past is founded on the idea of a more radical version of decentralization, which is known as secession. And so secession took place during the American Revolution, which was a attempt for these 13 sovereign states to secede from the larger empire.”