Courts are key players in the dynamics of federal countries since their rulings have a direct impact on the ability of governments to centralize and decentralize power. Courts in Federal Countries examines the role high courts play in thirteen countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Nigeria, Spain, and the United States. The volume’s contributors analyse the centralizing or decentralizing forces at play following a court’s ruling on issues such as individual rights, economic affairs, social issues, and other matters. The thirteen substantive chapters have been written to facilitate comparability between the countries. Each chapter outlines a country’s federal system, explains the constitutional and institutional status of the court system, and discusses the high court’s jurisprudence in light of these features. Courts in Federal Countries offers insightful explanations of judicial behaviour in the world’s leading federations.

Concurrency of powers – the exercise of jurisdiction by federal governments and constituent units in the same policy areas – is a key, if not the central, mode of governance in most federal systems today. Moreover, the experience has been that federal governments dominate the concurrent space giving rise to contestation. This volume, Concurrent Powers in Federal Systems: Meaning, Making and Managing, edited by Professor Nico Steytler, is the first to examine from a comparative perspective this crucial issue confronting both established and emerging federations. Case studies of 16 countries on five continents dissect the various manifestations of concurrency, analyse what drives this modern governance mode, and review management strategies that seek to guard against central dominance of concurrent areas.

Presents an examination of trends in ethnic federalism around the world with case studies from Nigeria and India. This book offers an analysis of Ethiopia's ten-year experiment with ethnic federalism, and asks why the use of territorial decentralization to accommodate ethnic differences has been unpopular in Africa, as compared to the West.

This book examines the impact of the federal restructuring of Ethiopia on ethnic conflicts. The adoption of ethnic federalism in Ethiopia was closely related with the problem of creating a state structure that could be used as instrument of managing the complex ethno-linguistic diversity of the country. Ethiopia is a multinational country with about 85 ethno-linguistic groups and since the 1960s, it suffered from ethno-regional conflicts. The book considers multiple governance and state factors that could explain the difficulties Ethiopian federalism faces to realise its objectives. These include lack of political pluralism and the use of ethnicity as the sole instrument of state organisation. Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Ethiopia will be of interest to students and scholars of federal studies, ethnic conflict and regionalism.

From a war-torn and famine-plagued country at the beginning of the 1990s, Ethiopia is today emerging as one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. Growth in Ethiopia has surpassed that of every other sub-Saharan country over the past decade and is forecast by the International Monetary Fund to exceed 8 percent over the next two years. The government has set its eyes on transforming the country into a middle-income country by 2025, and into a leading manufacturing hub in Africa. The Oxford Handbook of the Ethiopian Economy studies this country's unique model of development, where the state plays a central role, and where a successful industrialization drive has challenged the long-held erroneous assumption that industrial policy will never work in poor African countries. While much of the volume is focused on post-1991 economic development policy and strategy, the analysis is set against the background of the long history of Ethiopia, and more specifically on the Imperial period that ended in 1974, the socialist development experiment of the Derg regime between 1974 and 1991, and the policies and strategies of the current EPRDF government that assumed power in 1991. Including a range of contributions from both academic and professional standpoints, this volume is a key reference work on the economy of Ethiopia.

This volume examines the design and impact of courts in African federal systems from a comparative perspective. Recent developments indicate that the previously stymied idea of federalism is now being revived in the constitutional arrangements of several African countries. A number of them jumped on the bandwagon of federalism in the early 1990s because it came to be seen as a means to facilitate development, to counter the concentration of power in a single governmental actor and to manage communal tensions. An important part of the move towards federalism is the establishment of courts that are empowered to umpire intergovernmental disputes. This edited volume brings together contributions that first discuss questions of design by focusing, in particular, on the organization of the judiciary and the appointment of judges in African federal systems. They then examine whether courts have had a rather centralizing or decentralizing impact on the operation of African federal systems. The book will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers in the areas of comparative constitutional law and comparative politics.