Collective Equality: Human Rights and Democracy in Ethno-National Conflicts

Over the last decades international and regional human rights norms have been increasingly applied to constitutional provisions, revealing significant tensions between primary political arrangements, such as power-sharing institutions, and human rights norms. This book argues that these tensions, generally framed as a peace versus justice dilemma, are built on an individualistic conception of justice that fails to account for the empirical reality in such places characterized by ethnically-based political exclusion and inequalities. By introducing the concept of 'collective equality' as a new theoretical basis for the law of peace this timely book proposes a new approach for dealing with the tensions between peace related arrangements and human rights. Through principled, pragmatic, and legal reasoning the book develops a new paradigm that captures more accurately what equality and human rights mean and require in the context of ethno-national conflicts and provides potent guidance for advancing justice and peace in such places.