This book explores how today's independent African states can preserve and enhance their coherence while accommodating the legitimate demands advanced by ethnic groups for autonomy and particular interests and applies policy analysis to the search for creative state-ethnic relationships.

Foreword -- Introduction -- Managing Competing State and Ethnic Claims -- Francophone Nations and English-Speaking States: Imperial Ethnicity and African Political Formations -- State Claims and Their Implications for Ethnic Relations -- The State and Society in Africa: Ethnic Stratification and Restratification in Historical and Comparative Perspective -- Problems and Prospects of State Coherence -- Ethnicity Versus the State: The Dual Claims of State Coherence and Ethnic Self-Determination -- The State and Ethnicity: Integrative Formulas in Africa -- The Manipulation of Ethnicity: South Africa in Comparative Perspective -- A Response to Heribert Adam, and a Rebuttal -- The Claims of Ethnic Groups -- Modernization, Ethnic Competition, and the Rationality of Politics in Contemporary Africa -- Collective Demands for Improved Distributions -- Comparative Claims to Political Sovereignty: Biafra, Katanga, Eritrea -- Policies to Manage Competing Claims -- African Public Policies on Ethnic Autonomy and State Control -- The State, Public Policy and the Mediation of Ethnic Conflict in Africa -- The Dialectic of Autonomy and Control -- Federalism and Politics of Compromise -- Geoethnicity and the Margin of Autonomy in the Sudan -- The Ogaadeen Question and Changes in Somali Identity