Does territorial autonomy redirect violence from the national to the subnational level?

In this blog contribution to the Centre on Constitutional Change (March 2024), I presented the main findings from my research on the territorial displacement of ethnic violence. I argued that while autonomy arrangements reliably reduce civil violence directed at the national government, they simultaneously increase the risk of communal clashes between ethnic groups at the subnational level (particularly when the groups controlling regional governments lack adequate representation in the national centre). The Ethiopian case (1994–2018) illustrates this dynamic clearly: ethnic federalism reduced national-level conflict while intensifying local intergroup violence. My analysis shows that broad-based inclusion in the central government is the critical condition that determines whether autonomy brings peace or simply shifts violence to a different arena.