The Comoros: An Island Federalism

This chapter examines the case of the Comoros Islands and provides another example of how a complex, in this case an island, state, while clearly perceiving federalism as an onerous burden, is yet unable to give it up. The Comorian authorities fear that controlled instability within the federation will turn into uncontrolled disintegration in an untarist context. As a result, the small island state shows how the federalist matrix, at the will of political actors (or without it), can be transformed into the glue that holds together land segments separated from each other by the sea.