ABSTRACT
Territorial autonomy is not a viable option for managing ethnic conflict in Africa. The structural, historical and political conditions that have traditionally favoured the use of territorial autonomy elsewhere are nonexistent or occur only infrequently in Africa. Moreover, across the continent, varied combinations of distinctive group morphology, territoriality, changing bases of ethnic identity, and regime types and responses to ethnopolitical mobilization encourage communal contention and increase the strategic utility of multiethnic coalitions as a more effective alternative than the quest for autonomy for resolving ethnopolitical conflicts.
