Secession and post-sovereign constitution-making after 1989: Catalonia, Kosovo, and Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The year 1989 marked the return of the right to self-determination to center stage in constitutional politics. It was at the root of demands for constitutional democracy; it was also invoked by minority nations to make claims for secession and independent states. That year also marked the emergence of a new model of “post-sovereign” constitution-making that rejects the idea of a sovereign people who can act unilaterally with unlimited power. While this new model was developed in the context of transitions to constitutional democracy, before and after 1989, minority nations have relied on the unilateral declaration of independence as a foundational act of constitution-making, which is firmly rooted in the pre-1989 sovereign mindset. Drawing on the example of the Supreme Court of Canada’s judgment in the Quebec Secession Reference, I sketch how we might complete the legacy of 1989 by extending the project of post-sovereign constitution-making to secession.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".