Linking the Future to the Past: Ethnicity, Reforms and Pluralism

Abstract

Strategies of state restructuring promoted by global powers and institutions in recent times have focused on two broad avenues of ‘good governance’ reform — multi-partyism and decentralization. Among various implications of these reforms, their potential effects in terms of shifting political identities and bringing ethnic demands and conflicts to the fore are significant. In Africa in particular, though not only there, this translates itself into the need to examine the politics of ethnicity in the context of state restructuring. The present chapter seeks to address this task.