Non-Territorial Autonomy, Multiple Cultures, and the Politics of Stateless Nations

Until recently, demands for national self-determination were understood to be demands for the creation of nation-states for national communities governed by others. However, as there are more nations than possibilities of creating nation-states and, as many ethnic and national communities territorially overlap with others, and, as mass migration has altered the homogeneity of nation states, this accepted understanding of national-territorial sovereignty is being increasingly called into question. The aim of this workshop is to examine how national self-determination can be achieved without the need to create separate nation-states principally through the models called Non-Territorial Autonomy (NTA). The workshop will proceed in three steps. First, we invite theoretical contributions related to recent developments in theories of cultural diversity and national autonomy to see how they could help formulate new modalities for non-territorial self-determination. Second, we invite papers in the area of policy analysis, focusing on political strategies and policies that have increased the autonomy of stateless nations and the empowerment of minority communities. Here we invite evaluations of the governance of the stateless nations, as well as the accommodation of minority cultural and religious communities. Third, we invite papers examining the discursive reconceptualisation of national self-determination. Here the focus is placed less on policy but on the discursive representations of it: How are alternatives to territorial sovereignty discursively constructed by policy-makers and political stakeholders as legitimate forms of national self-determination? How are these alternatives discussed in public and/or reproduced by the mass media?