"Youth associations" und Ethnizität in Nordghana

Since the 1970s, numerous "youth associations" have been founded in northern Ghana. They organise self-help among migrants, promote rural development and lobby for local and regional interests in the national political arena. The article discusses the role which the youth associations play in the creation and delimitation of the communities whose interests they seek to represent to the outside world. Whether an association defines membership along territorial boundaries (districts, chiefdoms) or ethnic communities (which often crosscut administrative boundaries) depends, to a certain degree, on the specific regional constellations of power and interethnic relations which have developed from precolonial configurations of firstcomers/latecomers or autochthones/conquerors into the colonial (and postcolonial) political landscape of "native states" of different size and ethnic composition. Ethnic and territorial delimitations of the associations are often at odds with each other, as the article shows with the examples of the wars between Vagla, Konkomba and Gonja in the Northern Region and the recent conflicts over the creation of new districts and constituencies in the Upper West Region.