Autonomy Arrangements in the World

In a speech to the Corsican Regional Assembly, Emmanuel Macron proposed a constitutional text to build Corsican autonomy within the French State. France's President proposed a constitutional text to Corsica's elected representatives to build autonomy for the island "without any disengagement from the state". "It will not be autonomy against the State, nor autonomy without the State, but autonomy for Corsica and within the republic," he explained. Read more...

This blog symposium brings together a number of experts on territorial autonomy, most of whom participated in a workshop convened in June 2023 by the Åland Islands Peace Institute in cooperation with the Finland Institute in Berlin. The goal is to look at and discuss the theory, research methodologies, and practice of European and global territorial autonomy. Documenting some of the knowledge and the new ideas from this workshop allows us to share results at an early, and even experimental, stage of a still loose worldwide network of scholars. The network, and this symposium, include researchers from the fields of politics, comparative politics, international relations, and of constitutional, public law, and international law, all working within different theoretical and methodological traditions. Read all contributions here.

Power-sharing serves as a popular conflict resolution device at war’s end. Yet, the performance record of such arrangements is highly variable, sometimes leading to peace and stability and at other times to immobilism and institutional collapse. This open-access volume explores the adoption, function, and dissolution of power-sharing arrangements across the Global South, including case studies of Colombia, Ethiopia, Malaysia, and Iraq, and others to make sense of this mixed record. Authors identify a range of contextual factors as well as significant variations in the institutional rules and their meaning across the cases that help to explain divergent power-sharing outcomes. Emphasis throughout the chapters is placed on system adaptability for power-sharing success. Read more…

This open-access volume explores current and historical struggles for autonomy within ancestral territories, experiences of self-governance in operation, and presents an overview of achievements, challenges, and threats across three decades. Case studies across Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, and Canada provide a detailed discussion of autonomy and self-governance in development and in practice. Paying special attention to the role of Indigenous peoples’ organizations and activism in pursuing sociopolitical transformation, securing rights, and confronting multiple dynamics of dispossession, this book engages with current debates on Indigenous politics, relationships with national governments and economies, and the multicultural and plurinational state. This book will spark critical reflection on political experience and further exploration of the possibilities of the self-determination of peoples through territorial autonomies. Read more…