Partition (politics)

In politics, a partition is a change of political borders cutting through at least one territory considered a homeland by some community. historicist – that partition is inevitable, or already in progress last resort – that partition should be pursued to avoid the worst outcomes (genocide or large-scale ethnic expulsion), if all other means fail cost–benefit – that partition offers a better prospect of conflict reduction than the if existing borders are not changed better tomorrow – that partition will reduce current violence and conflict, and that the new more homogenized states will be more stable rigorous end – heterogeneity leads to problems, hence homogeneous states should be the goal of any policy national territorial unity will be lost bi-nationalism and multi-nationalism are not undesirable the impossibility of a just partition difficult in deciding how the new border(s) will be drawn the likelihood of disorder and violence partitioning alone does not lead to the desired homogenization security issues arising within the borders of the new states Daniel Posner has argued that partitions of diverse communities into homogenous communities is unlikely to solve problems of communal conflict, as the boundary changes will alter the actors' incentives and give rise to new cleavages. For example, while the Muslim and Hindu cleavages might have been the most salient amid the Indian independence movement, the creation of a religiously homogenous Hindu state (India) and a religiously homogeneous Muslim state (Pakistan) created new social cleavages on lines other than religion in both of those states. Posner writes that relatively homogenous countries can be more violence-prone than countries with a large number of evenly matched ethnic groups. Notable examples are: (See ) Partition of Africa (Scramble for Africa), between 1881 and 1914 under the General Act of the Berlin Conference. Partition, multiple times, of the Roman Empire into the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire, following the Crisis of the Third Century.