‘The Ethnic Question in African Democratization Experiences’
Paper prepared for presentation at the 10th General Assembly of CODESRIA, Kampala, Uganda, and 8-12 December 2002
Dr. Dickson Eyoh
New College, University of Toronto,
St. George Street, Toronto
Canada
"Not to be Cited or Quoted with permission of author"
Abstract
The past decade of African democratization experiences has thrown up a number of theoretical and practical problems about the relationship between democracy, ethnicity and citizenship. In some instances, democratization has been marred by ethnic mobilization and conflict; in almost all the cases, acute problems of formulating a common basic for citizenship rights has become apparent. How do we reconcile the rights of ethnic groups to the demands of a common citizenship within a democratic context?
Another problem is that of ethnic minorities who constitute a substantial proportion of the population of many African states. It should be borne in mind that Africa has the most ethnically fragmented states in the world. How do we address the theoretical and practical concerns of minority ethnic groups within the context of democratization?
In this paper I seek to illuminate Africa’s experiences of grappling with ethnic and minority questions within the context democratization. I also highlight pressing theoretical and practical issues in this area.
Introduction
Nation-building, which we intuitively understand as the quest to transform territories and their plural communities inherited from colonialism into development-sustaining nation-states whose subjects share a strong sense of common belonging, remains a defining aspiration of African nationalism. For post-independence leaders and elites, nation-building called for the primary use of state power to foster national identity at the expense of particularistic identities. This state-driven strategy of nation-building encouraged an approach to the management of ethnic difference that was marked by ambivalence. On the one hand, as political rulers moved to consolidate power shortly after independence they became ever more hostile to the formal organization and expression of ethnic-based interests. On the other hand, whether governing through civilian regimes or military autocracies, they sanctioned the use of ethnicity as the key ingredient of elite competition for power and resources. A common feature of early post-independence revisions of constitutions, justified by the quest for national unity, was the proscription of ethnic-based political parties. African intellectuals, dedicated disciples of the modernist project of nation-building and development, were equally, if not more, hostile to ethnic-based political competition. In this case, the hostility was stoked by the judgment that the self-serving manipulation of communal sentiment by the elite bore primary responsibility for the politicization of ethnic/communal differences.
This antagonism towards ethnicity in politics discounted interest in institutions that could facilitate more effective management of ethnic pluralism within participatory political contexts. The antagonism accorded with the suppositions of prevailing doctrines of development (liberal and neo-Marxist) which equated political modernity with growing national unity. The post-second world war international order condoned this bias for national unity. As the decolonisation process wound up, the emergent international order placed the normative emphasis on the territorial integrity of sovereign states which were vested with the right to self-determination and was unaccommodating to the claims of minorities within sovereign states.
Developments in the closing decades of the 20th century (ethnic conflagrations following the implosion of the Soviet Union and East European states, tragedies such as Rwanda, the apparent intensification ethnoregional contestations across the globe in the context of the so-called "third wave of democracy" etc.) have combined to undermine the belief that cultural homogeneity was a desirable and attainable attribute in a world in which multiethnic nation-states were preponderant. Such events have invigorated calls to dispense with the pretence of the "ethnocultural neutrality of states"; a pretense which is intrinsic in the liberalism’s projection of nations as homogenous communities of peoples with a standard bundle of rights and obligations to the state. Allied to the rejection of the myth of the ethnocultural neutrality of states is advocacy of ‘pluriethnic approaches to nation-building that decouple citizenship from nationality".
The past decade of African democratization experiences has thrown up many theoretical and practical problems about the relations between democracy, ethnicity and citizenship in nation-building. In some instances, democratization has been marred by ethnic mobilization and conflict; in almost all cases, acute problems of formulating a common basis of citizenship rights has become apparent. These problems boil down to a major challenge for democratic nation-building: how to reconcile the right to representation of ethnic groups to the demands of a common citizenship within a democratic context.
I am generally sympathetic to arguments in support of pluriethnic approaches to nation-building, and therefore consider as a major challenge of the current African political conjuncture the search for policies and institutional mechanisms that can effectively reconcile the legitimate interests of sub-national groups without circumscribing the fundamental democratic rights of all citizens and the capacity of states to pursue collective social aspirations.
Ethnicities attest to the genuine cultural diversity of African societies. Yet, it is the rare exception that ethnic political mobilization in the postcolonial era has been motivated by the need to defend the cultural autonomy of groups pummeled by the homogenizing impulses of state incorporation and economic modernization. The main engine of ethnic politics and conflict has been elite-led struggles for power and the resources of modernity over which states exercise overwhelming control. Therefore, however robust the utilitarian and normative arguments for pluriethnic approaches to nation-building, any design of institutions and policies to acknowledge rights to representation and power of sub-national communities is likely to confront a host of related problems. This paper addresses, at a high level of generalization, the practical dimensions of two such unexceptional and related problems.
The first problem pertains to the demarcation of group boundaries. Ethnic identities are not static and are always subject to contestation from within and without. Moreover, the vast majority of African nations are composed of ethnic minorities, and even in instances of relatively high degrees of convergence of ethnicity and space, historical and contemporary migrations have ensured that most local societies are multiethnic. Given these circumstances, what are and who decides the criteria for demarcating ethnic group boundaries and citizenship and what happens to local groups that are excluded by the chosen criteria. The second concerns the tension between the institutionalization of groups rights and democratic participation and accountability. Put starkly, given the reality of the resilience of patronage networks that are the bedrock of political power and wellspring of politicized ethnicity, what is to guarantee that the recognition and institutionalization of ethnic group rights does little more (as has indeed been the experience of Nigeria and other states which have attempted to decentralize power to sub-national units that a defined along ethnic and cultural lines) encourage the solidification of ethnic boundaries, firm local elite monopolies of power and a pattern of state rule based on ethnic elite compacts?
The balance of this chapter attempts to illustrate the "ordinariness" of these two problems in contemporary struggles to refashion state-society relations in Africa. It continues with an outline of the common narrative of why ethnicity has been the a "major problem" in African nation-building strategies; it then surveys the manifestations of salience of ethnic politics in the democratization experiences of the last decade; and closes with comment on the centrality of the two problems to the struggle for democratic nation-building.
Ethnicity and Postcolonial Nation-Building
The flow of commentary on political responses to the multifaceted crisis of development in which African countries have been enveloped in the last three decades betrays Africanist social sciences propensity to alternate, seemingly without much effort, between moments of exaggerated optimism and despair about Africa’s development prospect. Competing explanations of the causes of the "development impasse" agreed that the authoritarian post-colonial state was the primary culprit. The groundswell of popular opposition to authoritarian rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s was, for many, a welcome sign of the reanimation of the agency of Africans to design for themselves more promising futures; futures based on democratic politics and market economies. This euphoria did not last long as successive electoral cycles in the 1990s reaffirmed the resilience of clientelism and patronage as the dominant practice of politics. Civil society, whose supposed resurgence was much vaunted, turned out to be riven by communal divisions. Civic associations reflecting these and other cleavages have had scant positive effect on party formation and electoral competition, and often demonstrated little interest in promoting liberal democracy.
Accounts of the travails of current experiments in multiparty politics turn on unavoidably normatively-laden definitions of democracy and the criteria used to gauge its progress. To oversimplify, two, but by no means exclusive, perspectives are dominant in the literature on African democratization. There is the mainstream perspective which favors a minimalist (procedural) definition and sees periodic changes in governments through multiparty elections as the hallmark of democracy. For this perspective, unrelieved economic adversity, the paucity of middle and independent capitalist classes, cultural fragmentation etc. jointly explain the resilience of patronage and clientelism as bedrock of postcolonial regimes. Ranged against it are critics of liberal (minimalist) democracy, many of who are advocates of "popular" democracy. For them, the politics of clientelism endures because the main purpose of elite-driven multiparty politics is to widen the circulation and recruitment of elites and legitimate neo-liberal reforms, and not the transformation of existing inequalities in the distribution of economic and political power. For all the important conceptual and normative differences that separate them, the two broad perspectives share a view that the social pluralism of African societies (a phenomenon for which ethnicity has come to serve as an all too convenient shorthand) is the taproot of clientilist and patronage politics, and by extension, a leading, if not the primary, obstacle to democratic nation-building.
Whether the explanation is processed through instrumentalist or constructivist frames (which overlap considerably), it is taken for granted that contemporary African ethnicities are substantially products of the encounters of African societies with (western) modernity before, but especially during the colonial interregnum. That is, they are the outcomes of individual and collective renegotiations of groups identities in response to new (colonial) structures of domination and economic opportunities. The salience of ethnicity as political identity in the post-colonial era derived from the dominant strategy of localization of colonial states. Aptly dubbed "decentralized despotism" by Mamdani, the localization of colonial state power was foremost premised on the territorial and institutionalization segregation of state and society. Africans were defined as rural peoples who were best governed according to customary law within ethnically defined political-administrative units and under the tutelage of hierarchies of traditional rulers. The result was the increasing territorialization of ethnic identities and the privileging of colonial subjects of ethnic citizenship over broader (national) concepts of citizenship as the basis of rights and property. Together with other phenomena such as the cultural work of missionaries, the uneven geographical spread of socioeconomic change ensured that emergent class divisions tended to overlap with ethnic divisions. In effect, then, the strategy of colonial state formation assured that at independence African’s inherited nation-spaces that were deeply fragmented, national consciousness was rudimentary, and state-society linkages premised on networks of patronages that based on socioeconomic differences and kinship/communal ties.
This narrative of the colonial inheritance underscores the commonsense about the roots of the "ethnicity problem" in post-colonial nation-building. Whether deployed as an indictment of elite betrayal of the dreams of national unity and democracy or not, the commonsense holds that successor elites, in their drive to consolidate power, opted for reliance on colonial state patterns of political organization. As the end of colonial rule became obvious, attention shifted from a common struggle against colonial domination to struggle among the elite for control over successor states. Nationalist coalitions (typically with core regional core support bases) disintegrated as the elite turned to appeals to ethnoregional and kinship ties in the struggle for power and resources of modernity. They responded to the challenge of these centrifugal forces by centralizing and consolidating political power around the state and repression of political pluralism. In mockery of the premises on which its was justified, the reversion to authoritarian rule did not dampen the salience of ethnoregional-based political competition and conflict. It simply led to their internalization within state and party structures, with regimes (military and civilians) continuing as alliances of ethnoregional elites whose power rested on patronage networks sustained by ethnic and kinship ties. With the centralization of state control over economic resources (a phenomena authorized by the prevailing discourse of economic development), control of political power became all the more crucial to the acquisition of wealth. The dominant mode of regime consolidation encouraged a mercenary political ethos: the perception that the main business of politics was to gain control of state institutions for personal benefit and to enable elite contenders for power reward their followers. The mode of regime consolidation continued the differential incorporation of ethnoregional communities into state-centered systems of power. Significantly, for the present discussion, it meant the continued weaving into the fabric of state power of communal cleavages and uneven regional processes of socioeconomic change from which these cleavages derive their material content
There is not much to dispute about this commonsense of the primary role of the elite in the politicization of ethnicity and of the inherently authoritarian and exploitative character of clientelistic politics and patronage networks. However, as a needed corrective to the elite-centered thrust of much contemporary analysis, a fuller understanding of the dynamics of ethnic politics and the challenges it poses for democratic nation-building need to remain alert to two related pitfalls of this commonsense. First, the inclination to treat both ethnic communities and elites as homogeneous and static, and second, the tendency to view the politicization of ethnicity as phenomena manufactured by corrupt elites and consumed by more or less gullible masses.
A place to begin such an exercise is to appreciate what is the defining core of ethnic citizenship, and the reasons and ways in which it competes with broader (national) concepts of citizenship in the structuring of arenas and patterns of political competition. The distinction of "moral ethnicity" and "political tribalism" by John Lonsdale and Peter Ekeh’s seminal specification of two contending realms of politics in Africa (the primordial/ethnic/kinship based versus "amoral"/state-centered) are compelling maps to for such enterprises. They highlight, in their different ways, two dimensions of ethnicity and their political logics: the internal (moral ethnicity for Lonsdale and primordial for Ekeh) and external (political tribalism for Lonsdale and amoral public for Ekeh). The struggle for power and resources in the context of change is central to their political logics of both dimensions. The internal dimension is fundamentally about contested interpretations of culture/custom to set and police ethnic group boundaries as well as define/redefine the rights and moral obligations of group membership and their leadership. Relations within localized ethnic groups are not harmonious or egalitarian; competing elites and subgroups are continually contesting the meanings of group membership and seeking to renegotiate their assigned responsibilities. The important point is that, hierarchical and prone to a patriarchal authoritarian conservatism as they commonly are, localized kin-based ethnicity forms a basis of social trust and solidarity, in the sense that people can rely on others to fulfill their responsibilities to their kin (however minimal and lop-sided) and share a moral vocabulary for evaluating claims and efficacy of leadership. The external dimension of ethnicity is essentially "amoral" and basically involves struggle between ethnic groups over the sources of wealth and power controlled by states. In the competitive confrontation of "ethnic leaders" for control of power and the sources of wealth, success is defined as maximizing the power and resources available to one’s ethnic group.
The arguments favoring pluriethnic approaches to nation-building are differently composed, and the proponents differ in their interests in and preference for enabling institutions. However, it is possible to discern some common assumptions in their arguments, assumptions which accord with the thrust of the above understandings of the dynamics of ethnic politics as framed by competing conceptions of citizenship. At the core of these assumptions is the belief that, like their predecessors, post-colonial states remain divorced from (or uncomfortably related to) varied culturally-embedded understandings of the meanings of political community, the principles of representation and the moral anchors of political authority in societies over which they preside. This is because of what may be termed, to use a rather clumsy shorthand, the "hybrid" nature of states and societies which have been shaped and are continually reshaped by the intersection of local and external social, economic, political and cultural forces. The result is political systems which are ordered by overlapping and often conflicting notions of political community, principals of political representation and the moral basis for evaluating and contesting the legitimacy of political authority: one ethnically defined and the other national and state-centered. Second, however constructed, transformed and instrumentalized politically, ethnicity, as Eriksen puts it, "is always or nearly always metaphoric kinship." For the vast majority of contemporary Africans, the metaphorical kinship of ethnicity remains crucial to basic security (material and non-material) and to conceptions of selfhold and social belonging. It is thus the durability of kinship as the "most significant principle local social organization" (in Berman’s terms, the most fundamental unit of social trust) in the everyday interactions engaged in by people in pursuit of material and non-material goals that ultimately grounds the vitality of ethnic citizenship in contemporary. It is thus hardly surprising that, with the "failure" of postcolonial states to service their basic obligations to society, ethnic citizenship would retain or have reinforced its greater import on the organization of everyday life (including engagement in public spheres) than the abstractions of national citizenship.
Enough on these distinctions and assumptions. What is important to bear in mind (if we accept the centrality of struggle over the sources of wealth and power to both), is the recursive, that is mutually reinforcing and transforming, nature of the interactions of both dimensions of ethnicity and their political logics. Further, the reasons for the ongoing vitality of ethnic citizenship makes it easy to argue thus: trapped in ethnically-heterogeneous nation-spaces and hierarchical relations of power, subordinate social groups are as adept as the ruling elite in manipulating the tropes of kinship to negotiate the conditions of political representation and participation within the wider political system. In this way, they partake in the valorization of ethnic political consciousness at all levels of society, even as they ultimately are the losers in the flow of resources through patronage networks and elite-driven ethnic political rivalry. It is important to iterate that such an argument is not to excuse culpability of the elite for the politicization of ethnic identities. Rather, it is to suggest that, understanding the dynamic of ethnic politics and the challenge it poses to democratic nation-building need to take as the point of departure not what one wishes as the ‘proper’ course of politics but the concrete circumstances which define the choices available to the political agents. In other word, it is to argue the need to begin inquiry not by asking "what ought to be" (which tends lead to fixation on finding why the elite continue to betray the popular aspirations for national unity and democracy ) but by probing the socioeconomic and cultural circumstances that underscore the vitality of ethnic citizenship and the ways it can be reconciled with the demands of a common citizenship.
Democratization Experiences and the Ethnic Question in the 1990s
There is little doubt that the democratization experiences in Africa since the 1990s have been marked by an increase in the visibility of ethnic politics and conflict. While the constellation of forces shaping patterns and outcomes of electoral competition has varied across societies, it is clear that the return to multiparty politics has led to an intensification of the "politics of primary patriotism." Multiparty political competition reshapes the contexts of struggle among elites seeking to defend or challenge the distribution of state power and resources. It obligates both incumbent elites, long accustomed to rule without popular mandate, and opposition elites, to openly compete for the support of ordinary citizens. By prompting rearrangements of power relations at all societal levels, multiparty politics opens space for the "venting" of long-entrenched elite and communal grievances. The fragmentation of broad, urban-based movements opposing authoritarian rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s into parties with core ethnic constituencies, and the consequent regionalization of political competition are the most obvious expressions of this trend. It is a trend that is strikingly reminiscent of politics at the terminal phase of colonialism when elite attention shifted from the defeat of colonialism to struggle for control of the successor states and resources at their disposal.
The form, intensity, and ramifications of the "politics of primary patriotism" vary in accordance with the ethno-regional make-up of societies and their idiosyncratic histories of interethnic relations and conflict. The common font of ethnic competition, however, remains the weaving of communal cleavages into the fabric of state power and uneven regional processes of economic transformation from which these cleavages derive their material content. The informal clientelistic networks that dominate politics have involved reproduction of hierarchical patterns of incorporation of ethno-regional elites and communities within the state system of power. This has assured that both elite and popular evaluations of the relationship between the distribution of state power and material opportunities is framed in terms of class and communal advantage or disadvantage. A review of the postcolonial political trajectory of any randomly selected groups of states will bear this claim.
The military-managed centralization of political and economic power after the civil war (1970) in Nigeria, for example, that was enabled by the emergence of petroleum as the preeminent source of public income, resulted in the central (federal) state eclipsing regional governments as the main theater of accumulation and class formation. The continually reconstituted alliances amongst the three dominant ethno-regional elite blocs (North, East and West) and elites of minority communities for control of the central state has been regulated by the determination of the "northern" elites (civilian and military) to not relinquish control of the central state. The undiminished salience of this fundamental future of Nigerian state organization and politics since independence is evident in the pattern of electoral competition for national office between and within regions in the most recent democratic experiment. It also incubates the post-electoral sectarian violence in especially northern states, where elites who have come to view the current regime as inimical to "northern interests" have been threatening the imposition of Sharia as the juridical foundation of public authority.
In Kenya, the consolidation of the Moi regime called for a remake of the Kenyatta regime’s multiethnic elite alliance in a way that diminished the economic and political power of the Kikuyu faction. The regime has responded to the challenges of multiparty politics by a combination of state-orchestrated violence and an alliance between elites from Luo, Kalenjin and other minority ethnic communities who find common purpose in constraining the political resurgence of the Kikuyu. The inner sanctum of Biya’s regime in Cameroon has generally been viewed as comprised of kindred elites his Beti and co-ethnic groups. Here too, the regime has succeeded in deflating mass-based opposition to its incumbency by a mixture of state violence, manipulation of administrative rules and pressures on elites who are wedded to state patronage to become political leaders of their communities.
South Africa is held, with some justification, as an exception in the modern African political trajectory. Its present constitutional arrangements seem designed to and have been lauded for succeeding to dissuade ethnic political mobilization . Yet the post-apartheid state is not without traces of the above characteristics of African post-colonial states. The apartheid state was built on a tripartite race-based hierarchy of citizenship. Despite its impeccable commitment to a equal and universal citizenship, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is overwhelmingly supported by the African (black) majority while the major opposition parties are backed mainly by non-black (White, Indian and Coloured) minority ethnicities.
A related powerful propellant of the "politics of primary patriotism" is the internal competition amongst ethnic elite for control over local society. This is hardly surprising as the elite of ethnic communities is never homogeneous, and the symbols, grievances, and expectations marshaled to foster ethnic political consciousness and solidarity are typically contested by elites from the same community. Multiparty political competition accentuates the in-group competition for leadership characteristic of the process of moral ethnicity by making control over local and regional society all the more imperative for political success. Although instigated by urban-based social groups, current processes of political liberalization have lent a new or renewed significance to rural society, which, with the exception of heavily urbanized South Africa amongst the cases, is demographically predominant in African states. Across African societies, then, the vast number of political constituencies outside the "cosmopolitan" cities and towns continue to be differentiated by markers of cultural difference. This reality, understandably, encourages and rewards elite manipulation of kinship ideologies and communal identities in the quest for local and regional leadership.
Two increasingly common forms of such manipulation contribute significantly to inter and intra-communal political competition and conflict. First, is the invocation of distinctions between the "native/indigene" and "stranger/migrant" groups to assert the rights of communities to be represented by elite "sons of the soil". Second, is the resort to ever narrower definitions of kinship boundaries to found claims for leadership within culturally-related groups. The varied uses of autochthony, as opposed to residence, as the core principle for determining local citizenship and leadership buttresses commoner and elite conceptions of politics as primarily a struggle for supremacy between ethnic communities or kinship groups. The political efficacy of the manipulation of localized kinship ideologies rests on the ability of elites to repress internal dissent over their conceptions of ethnic and kinship boundaries. It feeds the increasingly violent politically motivated confrontations in local society that often pit one ethnic minority or segments of the same ethnic group against the other.
Both are, to a large extent, reflections of strategies of state penetration of local society that have substantially depended on the massive reorganization of internal boundaries (regional, divisional, sub-divisional etc.). A continuation of colonial logic of localization of state authority, these strategies have constituted a crucial matrix for the constant re-imagining and invention of regional and more localized kin-based identities. Nigeria may represent the extreme of this process of spatial fragmentation of the post-colonial state. But, as Mbembe has suggested for the continent as a whole, the continual redrawing of political-administrative boundaries was supposed to capture groups with shared cultures and languages. It has positioned as a shared political project of elite and commoner, struggle for ‘their area" to be accorded political-administrative status as this was deemed to confirm state recognition of the primacy of claims to local representation and power and collectively owned resources of groups considered indigenes of particular localities.
By Way of Conclusion
Analysis and debate on the ‘proper’ conditions and direction of state reform in Africa takes for granted the imperative of democratisation of polities and some form of "decentralization" of power, that is, the relocation of some powers from central state to lower level decision-making bodies. African nation-building projects remain incipient and approaches to the management of ethnic pluralism that are premised on the decentralization of power will, it should go without saying, have to be attentive to the need build central state capabilities to promote national unity and advance the collective objectives of societies over which they preside.
Two broad perspectives reign in the analysis and debate on decentralization, the management of ethnic pluralism and democratic nation-building. The first is represented by the "New Public Management (NPM)" approach, which is grounded in the reigning neo-liberal orthodoxy on development that insists on the simultaneous advance of free markets and liberal democracy as the only path to sustainable development. The reform programs of multilateral financial institutions, which have structured the debate and orientation of policies for the reform of governance institutions in Africa, are predicated on the assumptions of the NPM. For them, decentralization is largely a matter of divesting states of functions that are supposedly more efficiently executed by sub-national political-administrative units or private bodies. Deploying the populism of the civil society discourse, exponents of NPM tend to leave the impression that the downsizing of states somehow automatically translates into the growing empowerment of local society. They seem not too concerned about the implications for nation-unity posed by the downsizing of states. In fact, as has often been remarked, the fixation on economic efficiency as the main criteria for decentralization of power makes the NPM unreceptive to, for example, distributional policies which may be necessary to compensate for regional imbalances in resources and opportunities that often feed the alienation of ethnoregional groups and undermine the quest for national unity The second perspective, in contrast, evinces concern for the problem of recognition and representation of ethnic difference in state decentralization and democratic nation-building strategies. It is generally sympathetic to what has been referred to here as "pluriethnic" approaches to nation-building. The now near universal rejection of the centralist model of nation-building and agreement on the imperative of recognition and effective management of cultural pluralism within participatory political suggests that the thrust of current African intellectual sentiment is aligned, more or less, to this perspective.
In grappling with the challenges of developing democratic polities issues of theory, both empirical and normative, cannot be dealt with in historical and political vacuum. The same applies to the choice of institutional models and policies for managing ethnic pluralism. There are many competing models (ranging from "difference-blind states", Jacobin republicanism, civil society or bottom-up approaches to nation-building, multination federalism, consociationalism etc) for managing ethnocultural pluralism. It is a truism that, whatever their strengths and limitations, both normative and practical, none of the regularly discussed models can claim universal applicability. African nations vary widely in the total number and size of ethnic groups within them; from unipolarity where a single ethnic group comprises the majority of the popular (the exceptional case) to a deeply fragmented multipolarity of many groups none of which constitutes a large proposition of the population (the norm). Institutional engineering to manage ethnic difference in democratic political environments will have to be sensitive to the relative size and numbers of ethnic groups within them, and to how the histories of their formation over the past century of modern state-building has shaped the dynamic of inter-ethnic relations and conflict.
The analysis of the "origins" and conditions for the reproduction of the "ethnicity question" in the histories of modern state formation bears out the definition of the two central problems that confront advocacy of pluriethnic approaches to democratic nation-building. Without further comment on these, the reading of the dynamic of ethnic politics in the last decade of democratization experiences permits us to suggest both point to one profound, overriding problem. This is the apparent reinforcing of exclusionary conceptions of local citizenship that is authorized by militant appeals to ideologies of autochthony. Mamdani has forcefully argued that colonial use of cultural belonging, rather than residence, as the primary criteria of citizenship in local society imposed as the most compelling task of postcolonial nation-building resolution of the question "when does the stranger become a citizen?" In present times, when local societies have become even more ethnically heterogeneous, resolution of this question remains a fundamental challenge to democratic nation-building. For unless the question is answered in a fair and democratic way (which must necessary mean recognition of the freedom and equality all citizens), the use of cultural criteria to delineate citizenship rights within sub-national units risks further encouragement, if not the formal institutionalization, of differential and unequal local citizenship.