ABSTRACT
This book started out with a paradox: autonomy is increasingly proposed as the principal remedy for the resolution of self-determination conflicts, while it had previously been seen as a first step towards secession and the disintegration of the state. By the beginning of the 1990s, this position had fundamentally changed and autonomy came to be presented as the only effective guarantee for the maintenance of the territorial unity of states threatened by ethnic strife. Academics and practitioners alike asserted that the apparent disintegrative mechanism of autonomy-of institutionalised separation within the state-would serve to integrate and stabilise states otherwise prone to severe and violent conflict.
