Power-Sharing: Empirical and Normative Challenges

Description

Power-sharing is an important political strategy for managing protracted conflicts and it can also facilitate the democratic accommodation of difference. Despite these benefits, it has been much criticised, with claims that it is unable to produce peace and stability, is ineffective and inefficient, and obstructs other peacebuilding values, including gender equality. This edited collection aims to enhance our understanding of the utility of power-sharing in deeply divided places by subjecting power-sharing theory and practice to empirical and normative analysis and critique. Its overarching questions are: Do power-sharing arrangements enhance stability, peace and cooperation in divided societies? Do they do so in ways that promote effective governance? Do they do so in ways that promote justice, fairness and democracy? Utilising a broad range of global empirical case studies, it provides a space for dialogue between leading and emerging scholars on the normative questions surrounding power-sharing. Distinctively, it asks proponents of power-sharing to think critically about its weaknesses. This text will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of power-sharing, ethnic politics, democracy and democratization, peacebuilding, comparative constitutional design, and more broadly Comparative Politics, International Relations and Constitutional and Comparative Law. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Lists of illustrations Notes on contributors List of abbreviations Introduction: contemporary challenges to power-sharing theory and practice 1 Centripetalism, consociationalism and Cyprus: the ‘adoptability’ question 2 Power-sharing in Kenya: between the devil and the deep blue sea 3 Power-sharing executives: consociational and centripetal formulae and the case of Northern Ireland 4 Consociationalism in the Brussels Capital Region: dis-proportional representation and the accommodation of national minorities 5 Mandatory power-sharing in coup-prone Fiji 6 Ethnic power-sharing coalitions and democratization 7 Lebanon: how civil war transformed consociationalism 8 Power-sharing in Burundi: an enduring miracle? 9 Mostar as microcosm: power-sharing in post-war Bosnia 10 Power-sharing and the pursuit of good governance: evidence from Northern Ireland 11 Good fences make good neighbours: assessing the role of consociational politics in transitional justice 12 Gendering power-sharing Conclusion: what explains the performance of power-sharing settlements? Index