International records / OpenAlex research

Federalism, The Consociational State, and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria

From a theoretical perspective which views constitutions and constitutional arrangements as forms of political technology, this article argues that Nigerian federalism is based on a theory of the rights of ethnic groups to autonomous coexistence within the nation. This theory also provided a basis for the development and utilization of consociational conflict-regulating mechanisms, some of which gave rise to affirmative action policies to consolidate elite domination by ethnically-based fractions of the countrys political class. But the effectiveness of federalism and consociationalism as conf…