Federalism and Internal Conflicts

This book offers a broad perspective of revolutionary territorial politics by putting secession in the context of other forms of revolutionary territorial politics. This allows for a more complex and profound account of secession and offers the reader a conceptual approach to politics of revolutionary discontent with territorial status quo. Second, the book provides a multidiscoursive approach which combines the efforts of constitutional and comparative constitutional law scholars with international lawyers, EU lawyers and specialists in international relations. This allows for multifaceted and, in that regard, more adequate, balanced and rich analysis of secession and the other forms of revolutionary territorial politics.

This book conceives federalism not as a static institutional architecture, but as a dynamic formation always in flux. This may entail processes of federalization, but in some cases also lead to de-federalization. It looks at emerging federal structures worldwide and analyses federal structures: their emergence, operation and categorization. The contributors highlight that the “emergence” of these federal structures has multiple facets, from the recognition of ethnic diversity to the use of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution. Identifying and categorizing processes of federalization and defederalization in a variety of cases, the book provides much needed empirical and theoretical discussion on emerging federal structures and the changing nature of federalism in the post-Cold War era.

The book offers new insights into how ethnicity, language and regional-local identity interact within the context of Ukrainian political reform, and indicates how these reforms affect social cohesion among ethno-cultural groups. While the individual chapters each focus on one or a few facets of the overall research question, together they draw a nuanced picture of the multifaceted challenges to creating and consolidating social cohesion in a nationalizing state. The concept integrates various disciplines, including political science, international relations, law, and sociology. Correspondingly, the contributions are based on various methodological approaches, ranging from legal analysis over media discourse analysis, individual and focus group interviews to analysis of data from a representative population survey. The findings of the in-depth study are discussed within the broader context of comparative research on diversity management and social cohesion in fragmented societies.

This book provides a critical account of federal asymmetry in India - its origins, context, forms and functioning - by taking into account the institutional effectiveness of asymmetric institutions in the regions for identity fulfillment, development and governance. It argues that while some asymmetry, de jure/ or de facto, is part of all federations for meeting some special circumstances, in India, which has followed a different path of federation building, asymmetric institutional solutions especially in the border areas have played a crucially important role in accommodating ethno-cultural diversity, ensuring law and order, a level of development and governance in a process that has turned the ‘rebels into stakeholders’. India’s federal asymmetric designs and their working has been a key to holding the peripheries within the Union of India. The book utilizes both archival research and empirical survey data, as well as elite interviews.

This monograph thoroughly illustrates the debate on federalism and regionalism as it emerged in Italy in the years preceding the unification of 1861 and then again in the early 1990s, a debate mainly centred on the deep socio-economic differences between the North and the South of the country. Torn between centripetal and centrifugal forces, the Italian regional model implemented with the 1948 constitution and strengthened in 2001 provokes questions that intersect with topical debates engaging scholars globally, potentially stimulating  comparative discussions. While the future of Italian regionalism remains unclear, the Italian regional model combines lessons coming from different theoretical experiences, including federalism, sub-state nationalism, and the European unification process, representing  an novel experiment fashioned by those who were looking for a compromise between unitary and federal schemes.

This book examines oil and gas conflict dynamics (or conflict processes/mechanisms) with emphasis on conflict over resource ownership, control, management, or regulation, as well as sharing of revenues within the context of federalism in Canada, an established federation with a consolidated democratic structure and, generally, a decentralized federal institutional design over oil and gas, and Nigeria, an emerging federation with a centralized federal institutional design. The focused comparison of intergovernmental fiscal transfers in both countries in their historical and temporal contexts allows a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at play in the relationships between federalism and resource conflict in Canada and Nigeria, especially the continuity and change in the interactions between federal institutions, socio-economic factors, and political processes.

This book explores the relationship between federalism, social divides and conflict in African countries. It details the origins, design and performance of major federal and quasi-federal states to assess their performance and propose new methods for managing these divides. Drawing on evidence from countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, the book examines the nature and causes of ethnonationalism, mobilisation and confrontation with the nation state.

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 book 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.

This edited volume provides a solid yet accessible set of contributions for students, specialists and practitioners of federalism. It also reflects a commitment to normalising the connection between federal studies and scholarship on pluralism and diversity management. To shed light on a specific theme through a rigorous and comprehensive approach, most chapters compare at least two federal systems in connection with a given institutional matter or area of public policy.

Acknowledgements

The editors of the volume would like to extend their warmest thanks to the Programme d'appui à la recherche of the Secrétariat du Québec aux relations canadiennes, the Groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales, the Centre d'analyse politique – Constitution et fédéralisme, and the Canada Research Chair in Quebec and Canadian Studies. This project would not have been possible without their most generous support. The editors would also like to thank the entire editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan. In particular, they are grateful to Soeren Keil and Eva Maria Belser, who enthusiastically welcomed the present project into their Federalism and Internal Conflicts series, and to Ambra Finotello, Hemapriya Eswanth and Zeenathul Raeesa Ismail for their editorial support. They would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who helped to improve the overall quality of this collective work.
- Félix, Dave, and Alain

This open access edited book connects two strands of federal studies, fiscal federalism, and diversity accommodation, to answer two closely interrelated questions. The first of these is to what extent has the need to accommodate diversities determined financial relations and their evolution? The authors answer this question by conducting a thorough investigation of the types of diversity that drive such evolution. The second question is does fiscal federalism have a broadly positive or negative impact on the accommodation of diversities, by producing institutional solutions that either integrate a federal system or pull it apart?

Through contributions from experts in law, economics, and political science, the book uses a series of case studies to establish a theoretical framework for exploring the relationship between fiscal federalism and diversity accommodation. The authors lay the groundwork for a comparative study of this relationship in multilevel states.