Although Lenin's federalism – national union through limited autonomy for minority groups – seems discredited by its principal exemplars (the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia), Ethiopia's ethnic federalism may provide a counter-example. Established in 1991, this system offers the only ‘means of maintaining intact a multi-ethnic Ethiopia’, argues David Turton, genial editor of this edifying volume – even though, to his credit, many chapters challenge that claim. In this focused collection of well-wrought contributions, Turton imports the experience of federalism elsewhere to clarify the Ethiopian experiment, and uses Ethiopia's experience to illumine what federalism means and how it might accommodate ethnic diversity.

Chapters on India (Rajeev Bhargava), Nigeria (Rotimi Suberu) and Western democracies (Will Kymlicka) set up the comparative purview. In India, a flexible constitution permitted a novel kind of federation to emerge, in which divisions along ethno-linguistic lines evolved without threatening democratic freedoms and human rights. Western cases – Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, Spain and Great Britain – represent established nations in which territorial decentralisation was introduced to accommodate emerging ethnic claims. These developments came about peacefully only once ethnic ambitions ceased posing cross-border security threats, and by virtue of widespread consensus on liberal values.

The absence of these conditions in Africa portends considerable turbulence. In Nigeria, equating ethnic communities with autonomous federal units gave way, after much bloodshed, to the current system, which avoids conflating ethnic and administrative boundaries. Instead, it works to ‘fragment, cross-cut, and sublimate’ (p. 73) the three main ethnies dispersed among 22 states, facilitating interactions among state governments without reinforcing ethnic fault lines.

Nigeria indicates that making ethnicity the marker of political units is likely to exacerbate, not reduce, tensions among ethnies. Analysing the constitutional and political dimensions of the Ethiopian case, Assefa Fiseha asks whether multi-ethnic federations are capable of accommodating diversity, and notes the opposite view that ‘ethnic federalism will inevitably reinforce rather than minimize conflict between groups’ (p. 137). Three chapters illustrate this outcome: one on Ethiopia's western Gambella Province, where competition among ethnies produced violent conflicts by empowering the Anywaa (Anuak) at the expense of the significantly more numerous Nuer; one on the Southern Region, where the regime's emphasis on ethnicity promoted the social construction of conflicting ethnic collectivities which had not previously existed as such; and a third which traces problems arising from the salience of local languages, which Ethiopia's system relies on to define ethnic boundaries: increased importance of language encourages trivial local conflicts and leads to the swallowing-up of minority groups within regions.

One glaring omission concerns the two largest regions, Amhara and Oromia, each containing about 30% of Ethiopia's population. Without broaching this question, Merera Gudina, linking historical narratives with ethnic identities, notes the implausibility of defining Oromia as a liberated nation, since Oromo who went north figured importantly in conquests of southern Oromo. Christopher Clapham's Afterword just touches on issues posed by the two big states, which could ‘impose a deeply unstable bipolar system on the federation as a whole, with the two big nationalities … locked into conflict with one another and seeking competitive alliances with the different “minorities”’ (p. 233). Against the model of Ethiopia as a ‘prison-house of nationalities’ assumed by the reigning EPRDF party, he juxtaposes another model – likewise derived from student radicals of the 1970s – in which separate nationalities need not be made organising political principles but in which people of all nationalities can engage equally in a common political process. That alternative, Clapham concludes, implies a federal system ‘in which less emphasis was placed on nationality and more on territoriality’ (p. 236).