Publications

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…

The aim of this open-access textbook is to introduce, for the first time, the students to a comprehensive reading offering the opportunity to learn more on different aspects and issues around the multifaceted and evolving concept of non-territorial autonomy (NTA), which is a group rights model to deal with national diversity within states. The textbook comprises thematic topics and a selection of multi-and interdisciplinary as well as comparative overviews of an emerging research field. It also demonstrates from different angles—theoretical considerations, historical background, and practical implementation—the possibilities of NTA in addressing cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences. It thereby provides non-territorial solutions to one of the key societal challenges in contemporary societies. Read more...

This open access volume assesses Non-Territorial Autonomy (NTA) in terms of its practical capacity to support the linguistic, cultural, and educational rights of national minority groups across Europe. Its numerous detailed empirical studies, one of which uses the Framework Convention on National Minorities reporting as a benchmark, give a picture of the extent (or otherwise) to which international minority rights standards are actually being realized through various NTA arrangements. In keeping with the principles laid out in these foundational documents, the contributions to this volume acknowledge that when it comes to the effective delivery of linguistic, cultural and educational rights, NTA is best regarded not as an alternative but as a complement to territorially based arrangements. Read more...

This Handbook affords a comprehensive, pioneering and interdisciplinary survey of this emerging field. Moving beyond traditionally narrower engagements with the subject, it combines approaches to comparative law and comparative politics to provide an authoritative guide to the principal theoretical and empirical topics in the area. Bringing together a team of cutting-edge scholars from different disciplines and continents, the volume illuminates the latest thinking and scholarship on comparative territorial autonomies. This Handbook is an authoritative, essential reference text for students, academics and researchers in its field. It will also be of key interest to those in the fields of comparative politics, comparative law, local/regional government, federalism, decentralisation and nationalism, as well as practitioners in think tanks, NGOs and international governmental organisations. Read more...

This volume highlights the rights, institutions, decision-making processes and procedural rules that can protect and develop the practical political, economic and cultural powers of federated and regional entities, especially those linked to territorial national minorities. The authors focus on federalism as a safeguard of self-rule, as well as a set of institutional and procedural rules to avoid the territorial dimension of the "tyranny of the majority". They answer two fundamental questions: how is it possible to design new stable and fairer federal agreements between national minorities and majorities where there is no single ideal solution? Is there a need for a new kind of "defensive federal model" for approaching national pluralism in liberal democracies? Read more...