The Creation of Bangladesh: Remedial Secession or Fait Accompli?

No territory outside the colonial framework has seceded successfully from a state in the post-decolonisation era except one. This paper, presented at the Third World Approaches to International Law conference in Singapore, takes up the case international lawyers have never comfortably classified.

Two readings compete. On the first, the secession of East Pakistan is the single successful exercise of external self-determination by a non-self-governing people after decolonisation. On the second, it was a fait accompli of the India-Pakistan war of December 1971, and the law arrived afterwards to describe what force had settled.

The paper works through self-determination, secession, statehood, territorial integrity, the use of force and humanitarian intervention, sets out the legal case each reading can make, identifies where each is contested, and asks whether they can be reconciled or whether one ought to prevail in the present order.

Its TWAIL contribution comes in the second half. The two readings track a division between developed and developing, European and non-European accounts, so the disagreement is about who gets to narrate statehood as much as about doctrine.