Professor Sterio at the Radio Bleu Touraine radio station, participating in “The Inquiry,” BBC Word Service

Professor and Associate Dean Milena Sterio participated as a panelist in a BBC World Service radio and online show “The Inquiry,” in an episode entitled “Who Gets to Have Their Own Country?”  According to the BBC description of this episode, available here:

You might think simple rules decide the creation of nation states. You’d be wrong.

There are plenty of people out there who want their own state – like in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia, which both have independence referendums coming up. Yet the national governments in Baghdad and Madrid say the votes – whatever their outcome – won’t result in new countries. So how do you start a new country? Making sense of an atlas dotted with exceptions, special cases and lands in limbo, we ask: who gets to have their own country?

In addition, Professor Sterio was quoted in a BBC article on the same topic, entitled “How do you start a country,” available here.