Unions and Their Break-ups: the UK's attempted secession from the EU, and its possible outcomes

Northern Ireland expert, Brendan O’Leary, assesses what we’ve learnt from previous union break-ups to discover the potential futures that may unfold from the UK’s exit from the EU.

Brendan O’Leary is Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and an alumnus of LSE. He is the author, co-author, and co-editor of twenty eight books and collections, and the author or co-author of hundreds of articles or chapters in peer-reviewed journals, university presses, encyclopedia articles, and other forms of publication, including op-eds. His latest production is a three-volume study called A Treatise on Northern Ireland.

Professor O’Leary is the inaugural winner of the Juan Linz prize of the International Political Science Association for contributions to the study of multinational societies, federalism and power-sharing, and in 2016 he was elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, principally because of his contributions to the field of power-sharing. In addition to his scholarly work, O’Leary has been a political and constitutional advisor to the United Nations, the European Union, the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, the Governments of the UK and Ireland, and to the British Labour Party (before and during the Irish peace process).

Denisa Kostovicova is Associate Professor in Global Politics in the European Institute at LSE. She is a scholar of post-conflict reconstruction with a particular interest in post-conflict justice processes. She applies a bottom-up perspective on transition from war to peace and studies cross-border dynamics (political, social and economic) and their impact on post-conflict recovery. Her regional specialism is the Balkans, but she has also done comparative work with other post-conflict zones. She is the author of Kosovo: The Politics of Identity and Space (2005) and co-editor of a number of edited volumes, including Transnationalism in the Balkans (2008), Persistent State Weakness in the Global Age (2009), Bottom-up Politics: An Agency-Centred Approach to Globalization (2011), Civil Society and Transitions in the Western Balkans (2013), and Rethinking Reconciliation and Transitional Justice After Conflict (2018).

Bill Kissane is an Associate Professor in Politics in the Department of Government, LSE.

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