2 - Decentralization to Manage Identity Conflicts

Summary

States in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region since independence have had limited experience with stable constitutional arrangements for decentralization of decision-making to regional or communal governments. Experiments from non-MENA countries provide models that might be borrowed to help hold together MENA’s culturally plural societies. These other countries have experimented with nonterritorial, homeland, subdivided homeland, and multiethnic jurisdictions. These constitutional arrangements vary in the powers they allocated to the subnational jurisdictions to select local leadership and make cultural and economic policies. The constitutional arrangements also vary in the guarantees against central intervention in the internal affairs of the sub-national jurisdictions. To make these arrangements more stable, these experiments have tried various provisions for limiting unilateral constitutional amendment, sharing rule in the central government, balancing different types of jurisdictions against one another, and subordinating the constitutional order to international guarantors.