  Importantly, a remedial right only theory of the unilateral right to secede will only be defensible in the end if it rests upon a plausible account of what entitles a state to control over a territory in the first place. Without such an account the remedial right only view appears arbitrarily to privilege the status quo by requiring secessionists to bear the burden of showing that they have suffered serious and persistent injustices in order to establish their claim to territory. To answer this objection, the remedial right only theorist would have to provide and defend a justice-based theory of legitimacy, arguing that what grounds the state’s claim to territory is its provision of justice, and that it is for this reason that only serious injustices can void that claim (such an account of legitimacy is in Buchanan 2013). To avoid the charge that its theory of territorial rights gives short shrift to the value of self-determination, a remedial right theory would have to show that in some cases at least a secessionist group’s claims to self-determination can be adequately accommodated by intrastate autonomy arrangements that do not erase the state’s claims to its entire territory. And it would have to provide a principled account of when claims to self-determination are adequately satisfied through intrastate autonomy arrangements short of full-independence.