Governing Divided Societies through Non-Territorial Autonomy

The governance of states that contain different identity groups can become a focus of struggle between those groups. In democracies, majority groups will have governance advantages over minorities, unless these advantages are mitigated by minority-friendly institutions. These considerations tend to be framed as rights, or as institutions for minority protection. Majorities and minorities will frequently disagree on the structure of these rights as institutions. For the liberal view, human rights as individual rights provide sufficient remedies for those individuals who engage in practices such as the use of a minority language. International law and many courts reflect this insistence on an individual basis for rights. However, collective rights approaches have also been becoming more recognized in law and policy. The argument of this chapter begins from this orientation around collective remedies for minorities, in the form of autonomy as advocated by the Lund Recommendations. I first provide an overview of the territorial and non-territorial autonomy structures proposed in the Lund Recommendations. I then outline the ways in which majority-minority disputes are framed within an institutional framework of territorial autonomy, and I contrast this with the framing of majority-minority disputes under a non-territorial autonomy. I demonstrate how non-territorial autonomy removes the zero-sum nature of disputes between majorities and minorities such that better outcomes become possible for each than under conditions of territorial autonomy.