Public Profile

The Georgetown Center for Sovereign Partition Studies is a research institute housed within Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, dedicated to the academic study of national partition — its mechanics, its nomenclature, and its historically consistent failure to produce the outcomes its architects intend.

Founded in 2011 by a group of political scientists, cartographers, and linguists who observed that the twentieth century had produced enough partitions to constitute a field of study, the Center has since become the leading academic institution devoted to what its founding charter describes as “the orderly study of the disorderly dissolution of sovereign states.” It maintains a database of 143 partition events across 67 countries, dating to the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, and publishes the semiannual Journal of Partition Studies, which has a readership its editors describe as “small but extremely invested.”

The Center’s faculty includes specialists in boundary cartography, partition economics, population transfer logistics, and the linguistic conventions by which newly formed nations name themselves. Its senior research fellow, Dr. Elspeth Thorngaard, is regarded as the foremost authority on the relationship between geographic nomenclature and political boundary formation.

The Center has been consulted by the United Nations, the African Union, and, as of March 2026, the United States Senate. Its director, Professor Alistair Carmody, has described this last development as “not surprising, given the data, but somewhat ahead of our projected timeline.”

Private Profile

Role in the universe: The Center exists to provide institutional gravitas to the absurd premise that the United States might partition itself, and to do so with the exhaustive, credential-heavy seriousness of a Georgetown policy shop. It is useful whenever a story requires an academic institution that has been studying something no one thought would actually happen and is now calmly noting that its models predicted this.

Useful for: Partition stories, boundary disputes, naming convention debates, and any scenario in which the dissolution of a political entity requires expert testimony from people who have spent their careers preparing for exactly this.

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