Book Symposium

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Notes

These types of approaches are exemplified by Sarah Chartock's dissertation on electoral competition and ethnodevelopment, and Donna Lee Van Cott's work on institutional design/changes and its implications for ethnic politics (Van Cott, Friendly Liquidation; idem, From Movements to Parties).

See my “Federalism and Nationalism in Canada” 80–114. The situation in Nigeria is obviously different. The main incentive for groups to demand the creation of new states is not the desire to protect their culture or to exercise autonomy over their traditional territory but rather to get their share of national oil revenues. This is another example of the “resource curse” in action – a pathology that undermines many projects of democratization and good governance in Nigeria, whether at the central level or the substate level. Clearly, minority rights is not immune to this pathology, but nor is it the cause of the problem. If and when a way is found to prevent the corrupting influence of windfall resource royalties, then ethnofederalism in Nigeria might have different, and more beneficial, effects.

This point was made by Mahmood Mamdani at the symposium.

Patrick Macklem argues that international minority rights are best understood not as responding to some exogenous injustice out in the world but rather as rectifying injustices that international law itself created through its rules about the distribution and recognition of sovereignty over peoples and territories. See his “Minority Rights in International Law.”