State Formation and Criteria for Statehood in the Ethiopian Federation
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Date
2016-03
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The idea of Federalism is understood as organizing states into at least two layers of government
in order to realize self-rule and shared-rule among national and sub-national governments. With
regard to forming sub-national states that constitutes the federation; geographic location,
historical root, cultural association, ethno-linguistic or national identity might be the organizing
element for the federation. When the formerly unitary multi-national state is to be devolved to
form federal system of government, like in the case of Ethiopia, the very difficult question
immediately comes in to picture is on what bases the sub-unit state that forms the federation is
organized. This is a tricky challenge which faces every multi-national state that tries to establish
the federation. Once the organizing element is selected the next challenge is to determine the
criteria for those who able to form the sub-unit state since it is almost impossible or very difficult
to grant a sub-unit state for each and every nationality in the federation. The purpose of this
thesis is to explore this issue in the context of Ethiopian federalism.
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Keywords
federalism, multi-national federation, sub-national state formation, criteria for statehood