Abstract

Are (unilateral) secessionists traitors? In this paper, I first set out an account of treason that is, I argue, superior to competing accounts. This account is the disjunctive account, and it holds that someone is a traitor if he or she participates in activities that aim to subject the political community to which they belong to ongoing serious violations of self-determination, or which aim to commit widespread, systematic violations of the basic rights of individual members of that political community. I then apply this account to the case of unilateral secession. Unilateral secession, I argue, need not be treasonous, in part because it is difficult to explain how even many cases of unjustified unilateral secession necessarily violates the self-determination of the political community seceded from, or violates the basic rights of its members. I argue that this is true even when the secessionists fight a war of independence against their state.