Civil conflict and secessions

This paper studies secessions as the outcome of conflict between regions. We study under what conditions regions will divert costly re-sources to fight each other over political borders. We derive the prob-ability of secession and the amount of resources diverted to separatist conflict, and show how those variables depend on factors such as het-erogeneity costs, economies of scale, relative size, and external threats. We also model civil conflict over types of government, after borders have been determined, and study how this political conflict affects the incentives to secede