Autonomy Arrangements in the World

The 2023 webinar of our Annual Webinar Series "Discussing World Autonomies" focuses on "Autonomous Island Regions, Indigenous Peoples, and Self-Determination: Insights from Greenland and New Caledonia". Maria Ackrén (Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Greenland) and Elisabeth Alber (Senior Researcher at the Institute for Comparative Federalism, Eurac Research) discussed with Sergiu Constantin (Senior Researcher at the Institute for Minority Rights, Eurac Research) the particularities and similarities of the two case studies. You can watch here the recording of the webinar.

The 11th episode features ECMI's Senior Researcher Dr. Felix Schulte talking to Dr. Dawn Walsh about territorial autonomy as a solution to violent ethnic conflicts. Specifically, they look into the role of guarantee mechanisms and independent commissions in such arrangements. Dr. Dawn Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, and Director of the Institute for British-Irish Studies at University College Dublin. She is also currently the holder of an Irish Research Council Laureate Award for her project 'Power-sharing and independent commissions in post-conflict societies'. You can watch here the recording of this episode.

This open access volume assesses Non-Territorial Autonomy (NTA) in terms of its practical capacity to support the linguistic, cultural, and educational rights of national minority groups across Europe. Its numerous detailed empirical studies, one of which uses the Framework Convention on National Minorities reporting as a benchmark, give a picture of the extent (or otherwise) to which international minority rights standards are actually being realized through various NTA arrangements. In keeping with the principles laid out in these foundational documents, the contributions to this volume acknowledge that when it comes to the effective delivery of linguistic, cultural and educational rights, NTA is best regarded not as an alternative but as a complement to territorially based arrangements. Read more...

This Handbook affords a comprehensive, pioneering and interdisciplinary survey of this emerging field. Moving beyond traditionally narrower engagements with the subject, it combines approaches to comparative law and comparative politics to provide an authoritative guide to the principal theoretical and empirical topics in the area. Bringing together a team of cutting-edge scholars from different disciplines and continents, the volume illuminates the latest thinking and scholarship on comparative territorial autonomies. This Handbook is an authoritative, essential reference text for students, academics and researchers in its field. It will also be of key interest to those in the fields of comparative politics, comparative law, local/regional government, federalism, decentralisation and nationalism, as well as practitioners in think tanks, NGOs and international governmental organisations. Read more...