Ethiopia's Ethnic Federalism and the Rights of Regional Minorities: the Right to Political Participation of Non-indigenous Regional Minorities of Benishangul Gumuz Regional State in Ethiopia

In countries like Ethiopia, where several ethnic groups reside, the adoption of ethnic federalism may be the only solution for the accommodation of diversity and thereby promoting unity. But, even after the country's decade past experiment with federal structure, ethnic conflicts have been a great challenge for the ethnic federalism which the country's political elites are determined to pursue. After the introduction of federalism in Ethiopia, EPRDF launched the idea of self-determination for the nationalities, to ethnically defined regional states. Even though, the whole purpose of forming regional states on the basis of ethno-linguistic criteria was to address the issues of ethnic problems of the country, whether this has been achieved or not is far from incontrovertible. This book tries to scrutinize these problems from the perspective of minority rights and more specifically by taking a case in point of one regional state of the country, which is Benishangul Gumuz. It gives an excellent account to those who are interested to know about the Ethiopian federal experiment and particularly to students, academicians and policy makers.