Federal Theories and Practices

Vishnu Kumari Tandon is a Governance and Citizen Engagement Consultant at the World Bank. Her research focuses on federalism and participatory governance, and she is the author of Nepal’s Federalism and the Pursuit of Deliberative Democracy (2025). She has over a decade of policy and research experience internationally.Laure Gillot-Assayag is an associate researcher at EHESS and lecturer at Sciences Po, France. A specialist in political theory and intellectual history, she studies compromise in democracy. Her research on federalism was carried out during stays at McGill and UC Berkeley. She co-organized the 2022 EHESS international conference on federalism.Christine Forster is a Professor in the Law and Justice Faculty, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Christine’s research includes federalism and advancing gender equality, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, gender-based violence and sex discrimination. She has published widely in these areas.

• Chapter 1: Rethinking Federalism and Democracy:  What Political Theory and Case Studies Can Teach Us on Asian Federalism.- Chapter 2: Federalism and Democracy.- Chapter 3: Federalism and Democracy: The Political Thought of Johannes Althusius.- Chapter 4: Dilemma of a Democrat: Revisiting Nehru’s vision of federalism in India.- Chapter 5: Federalism, Participatory Democracy, and Democratic Legitimacy Deficits.- Chapter 6: Linguistic Federalism: Politics of Cultural-Democratic Accommodation in Tamil Nadu, India.- Chapter 7: Federal Nepal: Design and Deliberative Practices.- Chapter 8: Participatory Democracy and Federalism in Pakistan: A Study of Countering Terrorism.- Chapter 9: Malaysia’s Centralised Federalism: Shaped by (De)colonisation, Communalism and the Cold War, now Strained by Democratisation.- Chapter 10: Interpreting Central-Local Government Relation in Indonesia After the Introduction of New Capital City Law and its Impact to Democracy.- Chapter 11: The Prospects for Future Federalism in Myanmar’s Current Conflict.- Chapter 12: Long live butterfly federalism. Some Concluding Remarks.