Donald Rothchild is professor of political science, University of California at Davis. He has been visiting Fulbright Lecturer in Political Science at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda; senior lecturer in government at the University of Nairobi, Kenya; and visiting Ford Professor of Political Science at the University of Zambia. He is author of Politics of Integration: An East African Documentary (1968) and coauthor of Scarcity, Choice and Public Policy in Middle Africa (1978). Victor Olorunsola is now chairman and professor in the Department of Political Science at Iowa State University. He has edited and contributed to The Politics of Cultural Sub-Nationalism in Africa (1972) and written Societal Reconstruction in Two African States (1977).

• Foreword -- Introduction -- Managing Competing State and Ethnic Claims -- Francophone Nations and English-Speaking States: Imperial Ethnicity and African Political Formations -- State Claims and Their Implications for Ethnic Relations -- The State and Society in Africa: Ethnic Stratification and Restratification in Historical and Comparative Perspective -- Problems and Prospects of State Coherence -- Ethnicity Versus the State: The Dual Claims of State Coherence and Ethnic Self-Determination -- The State and Ethnicity: Integrative Formulas in Africa -- The Manipulation of Ethnicity: South Africa in Comparative Perspective -- A Response to Heribert Adam, and a Rebuttal -- The Claims of Ethnic Groups -- Modernization, Ethnic Competition, and the Rationality of Politics in Contemporary Africa -- Collective Demands for Improved Distributions -- Comparative Claims to Political Sovereignty: Biafra, Katanga, Eritrea -- Policies to Manage Competing Claims -- African Public Policies on Ethnic Autonomy and State Control -- The State, Public Policy and the Mediation of Ethnic Conflict in Africa -- The Dialectic of Autonomy and Control -- Federalism and Politics of Compromise -- Geoethnicity and the Margin of Autonomy in the Sudan -- The Ogaadeen Question and Changes in Somali Identity