Managing Diversity through Non-Territorial Autonomy: Assessing Advantages, Deficiencies, and Risks
Tove H. Malloy, Alexander Osipov, and Balázs Vizi
Abstract
Non-territorial autonomy (NTA) is a statecraft tool gaining increasing importance in societies that are seeking to accommodate demands by ethno-cultural groups for a voice in cultural affairs important to the protection and preservation of their identity, such as language and education, as well as religion. NTA offers policymakers a range of options for institutional design adaptable to specific circumstances and historical legacies. It devolves degrees of power through legal frameworks and institutions in specific areas of ethno-cultural life, while maintaining social unity at the core level ... More
Non-territorial autonomy (NTA) is a statecraft tool gaining increasing importance in societies that are seeking to accommodate demands by ethno-cultural groups for a voice in cultural affairs important to the protection and preservation of their identity, such as language and education, as well as religion. NTA offers policymakers a range of options for institutional design adaptable to specific circumstances and historical legacies. It devolves degrees of power through legal frameworks and institutions in specific areas of ethno-cultural life, while maintaining social unity at the core level of society. Throughout Europe and North America, NTA exists and is implemented at state, regional, and local levels. The book carves out a space for contextual knowledge production on NTA in law and the social and political sciences. What are the institutions, bodies, and functions that ethno-cultural groups can draw on when seeking to have a voice in their own affairs, as well as over issues in society related to their identity production? How are these entities incorporated and empowered to have a voice? What degree of voice do they have, and how are they designed to project the voice? Thus, contextual knowledge also involves critical assessment and risk analyses as well as penetrating insights as to the unintended consequences and hidden agendas that may inform NTA policies.
Keywords:
non-territorial autonomy,
ethno-cultural groups,
cultural affairs,
identity,
institutional design,
social unity
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198738459 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198738459.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Tove H. Malloy, editor
Director, European Centre for Minority Issues
Alexander Osipov, editor
Senior Research Associate, European Centre for Minority Issues
Balázs Vizi, editor
Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Minority Studies, Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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