*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

In the dying days of his rule, Bashar Al-Assad reportedly tried one last desperate gamble to remain in power: sectarian partition of Syria. He proposed to his Russian patrons that he would abandon Damascus for Syria’s coastal region, where his Alawite sect are demographically predominant, and proclaim the revival of the Alawite State, a polity that had briefly existed during the French colonial period. With most Syrian Kurds residing in the de facto breakaway Northeastern entity of Rojava, Assad’s scheme could set the seal on a tripartite ethnic division of Syria. Moscow’s answer came back: No. Though Russian rejection was probably motivated more by being too occupied in Ukraine to assist Assad, it’s striking that the Kremlin reportedly opposed breaking up Syria at all – and all the more surprising in an international environment which had seemingly returned to the idea of partitioning spaces along ethnic lines. Partitionism seemed to have returned with a vengeance in the 2010s. But, as I will argue here, that return has failed to manifest – though why is a tougher question.

In the early 20th Century, as ethnic nationalism spread, drawing lines on a map in an attempt to carve heterogenous territories into new homogenous states became a common diplomatic practice of the era’s premier imperial power – Britain. After partitioning Ireland into Protestant and Catholic-majority states in 1920, British diplomats mediated new Greco-Turkish borders drawn along ethnic lines in 1923, proposed partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in 1937 (adopted by the UN a decade later), assisted the Nazi breakaway and annexation of Czechoslovakia’s ethnically German borderlands in 1938, pushed for the post-World War II wholescale redrawing of the map of East-Central Europe and, of course, split their huge South Asian colony into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947. Usually these partitions were accompanied by large-scale ethnic cleansing, as people were forcibly uprooted from the “wrong” side of the new border. Indeed, British officials often saw this as desirable, given the whole point of the new borders was ethnic homogenisation. No less a figure than Winston Churchill commented: “There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble... A clean sweep will be made.”

In the Cold War, however, partitionism went out of fashion. As decolonisation swept the world, the newly independent states strongly insisted on the sanctity of the old imperial boundaries that were now their borders, seeing efforts to alter them according to ethnic criteria as a continuation of colonial-era “divide and rule” policies. When adjudicating a boundary dispute between Burkina Faso and Mali in 1986, the International Court of Justice explicitly noted the “exceptional importance” of this principle – known as uti possedetis juris – to African states, and elaborated that:

Its obvious purpose is to prevent the independence and stability of new States being endangered by fratricidal struggles provoked by the challenging of frontiers following the withdrawal of the administering power.

Its obvious purpose is to prevent the independence and stability of new States being endangered by fratricidal struggles provoked by the challenging of frontiers following the withdrawal of the administering power.

Accordingly, the South African apartheid regime’s efforts to maintain White rule by carving ethnic “bantustans” out of its territory went denounced and unrecognised by the international community. When Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 to partition the island into ethnically homogenous Turkish and Greek halves by proclaiming a new “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, the international response once again was denunciation and non-recognition.

When Yugoslavia collapsed in the 1990s, despite local nationalist leaders aggressively pushing for total regional ethnic partition, the international anti-partitionist norm provided a strong countervailing force. When the French judge Robert Badinter........

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