The Foreign Service Journal, April 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2023 55 Breaking Apart Is the Right Thing to Do— Or Is It? Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism Edited by Arie M. Dubnov and Laura Robson, Stanford University Press, 2019, $30, e-book available, 400 pages. Reviewed by George Aldridge “Stronger Together” has been a recent rallying cry in the United Kingdom and Spain to stem separatist sentiments in Scotland, the Basque Country (Euskadi), and Catalonia. Elsewhere, however, separatists in lands as dissimilar as Eritrea, the ex- Yugoslavia, Timor-Leste, and South Sudan have prevailed after years of bloody conflict drenched with sectarian and ethnic enmity. Brittle political institutions are barely keeping Bosnia and Iraq from splintering into ethnic-sectarian enclaves. Cyprus appears irrevocably divided. The debate over the utility and viability of the heterogeneous, pluralistic, multi- ethnic, multiconfessional state versus a pri- marilyhomogenous one continues unabated —particularly as 2022marked the centennial of the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty partitioning Ireland into the Irish Free State and Ulster, and the 75th anniversaries of the partitions of Palestine and India. Given the subsequent persistent spasms of internecine violence and war involving Northern Ireland, Pakistan- India, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Israel and its Arab neighbors, an appraisal of these three partitions should be instructive in answering the question posed in Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism .