- Bridging comparative politics and comparative constitutional law : constitutional design in divided societies / Sujit Choudhry
- Integration or accommodation? : the enduring debate in conflict regulation / John McGarry, Brendan O'Leary, and Richard Simeon
- Beyond the dichotomy of universalism and difference : four responses to cultural diversity / Alan Patten
- The internationalization of minority rights / Will Kymlicka
- Does the world need more Canada? : the politics of the Canadian model in constitutional politics and political theory / Sujit Choudhry
- Ethnic identity and democratic institutions : a dynamic perspective / Richard H. Pildes
- Indonesia's quasi-federalist approach : accommodation amid strong integrationist tendencies / Jacques Bertrand
- Integrationist and accommodationist measures in Nigeria's constitutional engineering : successes and failures / John Boye Ejobowah
- The limits of constitutionalism in the Muslim world : history and identity in Islamic law / Anver E. Emon
- A tale of three constitutions : ethnicity and politics in Fiji / Yash Ghai and Jill Cottrell
- Rival nationalisms in a plurinational state : Spain, Catalonia, and the Basque country / Michael Keating
- Iraq's constitution of 2005 : liberal consociation as political prescription / John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary
- Consociation and its critics : Northern Ireland after the Belfast Agreement / John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary
- Recognition without empowerment : minorities in a democratic South Africa / Christina Murray and Richard Simeon
- Giving with one hand : Scottish devolution within a unitary state / Stephen Tierney.
How should constitutional design respond to the opportunities and challenges raised by ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural differences, and do so in ways that promote democracy, social justice, peace and stability? This is one of the most difficult questions facing societies in the world today. There are two schools of thought on how to answer this question. Under the heading of accommodation, some have argued for the need to recognize, institutionalize and empower differences. There are a range of constitutional instruments available to achieve this goal, such as multinational federalism and administrative decentralization, legal pluralism (e.g. religious personal law), other forms of non-territorial minority rights (e.g. minority language and religious education rights), consociationalism, affirmative action, legislative quotas, etc. But others have countered that such practices may entrench, perpetuate and exacerbate the very divisions they are designed to manage. They propose a range of alternative strategies that fall under the rubric of integration that will blur, transcend and cross-cut differences. Such strategies include bills of rights enshrining universal human rights enforced by judicial review, policies of disestablishment (religious and ethnocultural), federalism and electoral systems designed specifically to include members of different groups within the same political unit and to disperse members of the same group across different units, are some examples. In this volume, leading scholars of constitutional law, comparative politics and political theory address the debate at a conceptual level, as well as through numerous country case-studies, through an interdisciplinary lens, but with a legal and institutional focus.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)