Constitutional peacebuilding: regional autonomy

To safeguard peace in multi-ethnic countries, many scholars and practitioners recommend regional autonomy, for instance in the form of federalism, decentralization, or autonomous regions. However, the effects of regional autonomy closely depend on its institutional design and can critically differ between different contexts. As a result, the institutionalization of autonomy oftens entail difficult trade-offs. Hence, rather than examining whether autonomy “works” for safeguarding peace, it is more fruitful to investigate the conditions under which it does.

Adopting this rationale, I examine the consequences of regional autonomy for various forms of ethno-nationalist conflict, while paying close attention to its institutional design and the societal context in which it is embedded. Specifically, the project makes the following key contributions:

• First, together with Kristin Bakke (Juon & Bakke 2023), I provide an updated overview on research that examines how regional autonomy affects secessionist conflict. We highlight three important research areas: (1) accounting for the difficult circumstances under which regional autonomy is often adopted in the first place; (2) examining how its institutional design affects its consequences for conflict (including its policy scope and the drawing of administrative boundaries), and (3) how different societal contexts moderate its impact (e.g., depending on the degree of preceding ethnic violence). We argue that sustained attention to these aspects holds the promise of transcending the still indeterminate “pro/con” debate on the merits of regional autonomy as a constitutional peacebuilding tool. Consequently, these aspects are also at the forefront of all my empirical contributions in this project (see points 2-5 below).
• Second, in an advanced working paper (Juon, WP1), I introduce new global data on constitutional rules that provide for regional autonomy (as part of an updated version of the Constitutional Power-Sharing Dataset, CPSD) and new geographic information on regional boundaries (as part of the new Significant Administrative Units Dataset, SAU). Both new datasets cover 181 countries since the end of World War II (1946-present). Hence, they enable me, and other researchers, to quantitatively examine the effects of regional autonomy for a global sample, while paying close attention to its specific institutional design, including federal and autonomous regions’ policy scope and their geographic boundaries.
• Third, in the same working paper (Juon WP1), I use this new data to revisit the controversial debate on how regional autonomy affects secessionist conflict. My findings highlight the key role of how autonomous regions’ boundaries are drawn, with respect to ethnic settlement patterns: if ethnic groups are unified in a single autonomous region, as in contemporary Iraq (Kurdistan), Belgium (Flanders, Wallonia), and Nigeria in the post-independence period (Norther, Western, and Eastern regions), the risk of secessionism increases substantially. This contrasts with cases in which groups are split into multiple homogeneous regions, as in contemporary Nigeria, Kenya, and Switzerland. In such cases, the risk of secessionism is substantially lower.
• Fourth, together with Daniel Bochsler (Juon & Bochsler 2023), I examine the differing effects of regional autonomy in different temporal contexts, distinguishing between times of regime transitions (e.g., democratization) and times when the political regime is stable. Our findings highlight that group leaders can exploit autonomy as a basis for ethno-nationalist mobilization during regime transitions, during which the emerging regime is still unconsolidated. However, we also find that this relationship is mitigated where autonomous groups are included in the central government. Thereby, they underline advice that autonomy should be combined with central government inclusion to generate trust and enable institutionalized bargaining during regime transitions.
• Finally, I two recent publications, I highlight connections between regional autonomy and subnational communal violence. In a co-authored study (Juon & Rohrbach, 2023), we show that ethnic federalism in Ethiopia (1994-2018) has increased localized ethnic violence, by generating tensions over local government control. In a recent study in American Political Science Review (Juon, 2024), I generalize this argument, showing that the local tensions generated by autonomy (in Ethiopia and elsewhere) can be mitigated by inclusive national governments. In a global analysis covering pairs of ethnic groups in more than 4000 administrative regions and 139 multi-ethnic countries (1989-2019), I provide quantitative evidence for this argument.

Please click on the publications’ descriptions and dataset links below to learn more about these contributions.

Related publications

Managing self-determination struggles through decentralization
Juon, Andreas & Bakke, Kristin (2023). In: Aleksandar Pavkovic, Peter Radan & Ryan Griffiths (Eds.): Routledge Handbook on Self-Determination and Secession. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 443-456.
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Ongoing work

Internal administrative boundaries and self-determination demands
Juon, Andreas (WP1). Advanced draft, in revision.

The survival and collapse of constitutional peacebuilding, 1945-2018
Juon, Andreas (WP4). First draft under preparation.

Related data