Perverse Decentralization: Federal Bargains, Ethnic Outbidding, and Conflict Management in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Sudan

This article develops perverse decentralization as an analytical lens for understanding federal bargains and ethnic outbidding: decentralisation as conflict management in multi-national african states. It argues that decentralization can displace conflict from the centre to the local arena when boundary design, fiscal authority, and security command are misaligned, encouraging elites to mobilize ethnicity within new subnational institutions. Drawing on controlled comparison of three federal or quasi-federal systems; subnational quantitative analysis of conflict events (acled) before and after decentralisation; process tracing of constitutional design episodes; interviews with constitutional law practitioners., the paper links the theoretical debates identified in federalism theory (riker; stepan); ethnic outbidding (horowitz); power-sharing theory (lijphart; roeder & rothchild); political settlements. develops a theory of 'perverse decentralisation'. devolution that fragments political competition to the local level without resolving national distributional conflicts. to a comparative and historically grounded reading of South Sudan and the related cases assembled in the research design. The article advances three core claims. First, devolution reduces conflict only when subnational units have credible fiscal authority, clear boundaries, and protections against security sector capture by dominant local coalitions. Second, ethnic entrepreneurs exploit the ambiguities of federal design by translating national distributional struggles into local contests over offices, districts, and customary authority. Third, comparative evidence from Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Sudan indicates that decentralization becomes perverse when it multiplies veto points without creating imparti