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Polycentric interstate federalism among the Yoruba of Nigeria (2022) [pdf] (files.wordpress.com)
43 points by brandonlc on Sept 23, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



The Yoruba religion has some fascinating stuff reminiscent of Hebrew numerology or the I Ching and a code that is effectively binary and base 16:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%C3%A1

https://yorubauniverse.blogspot.com/2017/02/datainformation-...


Oh man this is so cool, thanks!


Excellent find. What brought you to it?


Thanks!

The author's scholarship brought me to it. I was the guest editor of the journal issue in which this article appeared. Here's the scholar's, um, Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=oye.... The author hails from Indiana University's Political Science Dept, which is currently one of the most interesting in the world.


The paper is well written, but unfortunately for me at least, very verbose and fails to get to the point quickly enough.

Anyway, my takeaway is that "Polycentric Interstate Federalism" is very similar to what has happened so far with the European Union, and it would be fair to say that it has not been a resounding success.

Did I miss something important? Would you agree?


It's an poltical sociology paper. It's narrowly observing the federal clan system among the Yoruba ethnic group.

This is not meant to be prescriptive, it's more so comparative.

Also, I'm not sure Hausa, Fulani, Igbo, or other ethnic groups would be interested in adopting a Yoruba socio-political structure when they already have their own structures in place.

> is very similar to what has happened so far with the European Union

Not exactly, because individual EU states still maintain national sovereignty in just about every single affair.

A better comparison to this would be the evolution of federalism in Italy and Germany in the 19th-21st century.


> A better comparison to this would be the evolution of federalism in Italy and Germany in the 19th-21st century.

Or the United States...https://www.jstor.org/stable/48647382


I’m curious, can the poster or anyone else who’s familiar with the topic share which specific part from this (academic) PDF you find intellectually gratifying to warrant further discussion on HN?


Not OP. HN is a place for hacker and startup discussions. Both groups are interested in the way systems are organised, whether political or information (i.e programming) so there is insight to be gained from novel political systems such as “interstate federalism”.


+1 on this.




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