Existing analytical approaches are poorly equipped to make sense of political entities that aspire sovereign statehood and present themselves accordingly, but which lack a recognised status. The prevalent scholarship struggles to categorize sovereignty-aspiring entities.

This project departs from the extant literature in that it places the unsettled nature of sovereignty-aspiring entities – their defiance of categories – at the heart of the equation. Rather than resolving the interpretative “to be of not to be” dilemmas around their status and activities, the inherent contingency of separatist politics becomes our central vantage point. Turning to political performativity and aesthetics, the project seeks to determine how the performative repertoires of sovereignty-aspiring entities create democratic political space to bend or break the bounds of the formal institutional landscape.

The project centres on three case contexts, which are highly rich and highly diverse: the Catalonian independence movement, the autonomous administration of Rojava (Syria) and the Tamil nationalist movement in Sri Lanka. It takes an inductive approach to then corroborate our findings within and beyond these cases.

The project is structured around four inter-connected work packages each with its own research question and method. 1) We will use political ethnography to establish what political repertoires sovereignty-aspiring entities use. 2) We will use qualitative content analysis and art-based methods to assess the aesthetic dimensions of these repertoires. 3) We will use focus-group workshops to establish constituencies' understandings of these repertoires. 4) We will build a database of separatist political repertoires around the globe to validate our findings.

The project’s overall objective is to give a new impetus to the study of separatist conflicts with a rich and robust research agenda that combines a new conceptual lens with an innovative methodological approach.