Justifying self-determination: The persistent alienation principle

This paper describes and defends a novel principle for allocating self-determination powers: the persistent alienation principle. This holds that there are pro tanto grounds for extending greater powers of self-determination to persistently alienated internal minorities who seek such powers, if doing so will alleviate their alienation without alienating or threatening the basic interests of others. For this principle, alienation should be understood in structural rather than subjective terms, as something experienced by people as members of groups that are negatively defined or politically positioned in such a way as to injure their members’ civic standing.