Revised version of the paper presented at the conference In Search of Justice and Stability: Liberal Justice and Political Stability in Multinational Societies, 26-28 March 1998, McGill University, Group of Research on Multinational States, North Hatley, Quebec, Canada. Published in Gagnon, A.-G. & Tully, J. (eds.), Multinational Democracies, pp. 201-221, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.In this paper we deal primarily with the concept of ethnoterritoriality, which refers to a dimension where conflicts and political mobilisations are developed and have as chief social actors those ethnic groups that possess a geographical underpinning. Such a spatial reference is identifiable within the boundaries of a polity, usually of a compound or plural composition (Coakley, 1994; Moreno, 1988; Rudolph and Thompson, 1992).Peer reviewed