In the wake of the 1994 transition from apartheid in South Africa, consociational democracy appeared to have come of age. Power-sharing arrangements emerged in places such as Bosnia-Herzegovina (1995), Fiji (1997), Northern Ireland (1998), Burundi (2005) and Sudan (2005) that were aimed at ameliorating ethnic conflict, bridging differences and achieving political stability. As recommended by Arend Lijphart in the 1960s and 1970s, consociational powersharing seemed to provide a robust method for sustaining democracy in inhospitable deeply ethnically divided settings. The rehabilitation of Lebanon’s 1944 National Pact in the Ta’if Accord of 1989 appeared to offer a vindication of the power-sharing model, as did political settlements in Macedonia (2001), Afghanistan (2004), Iraq (2005) and Kosovo (2008). Yet no new cases of consociational democracy have emerged over the past fifteen years. With renewed rivalry on the international stage, external conditions are no longer as hospitable to such arrangements as they were in the early post-Cold War years. Authoritarian regimes have proliferated, while intrastate group-based conflicts have grown more intractable. Several of the longer-established consociational cases too, including Bosnia, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, have come under renewed pressures, again influenced by changes in the international environment.

We call for contributors to this workshop to revisit interpretations and assumptions of the post-Cold War era and how this shaped the 1990s and 2000s experiments with power-sharing democracy:

• Did external engagement assist or damage the functioning of power-sharing institutions in places like Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Northern Ireland?
• Can external pressure bring antagonistic actors into cooperative relationships? Has ‘coercive consociationalism’ worked?
• How dependent were the 1990s and 2000s arrangements on external actors’ one-off and continuous involvement in facilitating the functioning of consociational democracies?
• Was there sufficient attention to the temporarily benign international environment of the 1990s and 2000s or to the likelihood that this might not endure?
• Are there likely to be revived efforts to establish consociational power-sharing settlements in the future with or without international assistance?

The workshop will take place on October 16th and 17th, in person; we anticipate an intensive debate to take place then with all participants involved with the eventual aim of working together on a special issue that would bring all these contributions together.

Programme

Wednesday, 16 October - Location: 27 University Sq/01/003

14:30 Welcome by Timofey Agarin (online) & Opening remarks by Jon Fraenkel

15:00-17:00 Panel 1

Adrian Guelke (Queen's University of Belfast) External factors and the revival of power-sharing in Northern Ireland and South Africa

Sangit Kumar Ragi & Reena Ragi (University of Delhi) Consociationalism and Stable Democracy: Does India Represent a Case of Deviant?

Amer Kurtović (International Burch University), The Role of Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces in the Administrative, Executive, and Parliamentary (in)Action of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Context of EU Accession

Joanne McEvoy (University of Aberdeen) with Allison McCulloch (Brandon University), and Edward Morgan-Jones (University of Kent) How Do Elites Think about Citizen Inclusion in Power-Sharing Peace Settlements?

Thursday, 17 October - Location Peter Froggatt Centre/01/020

09:30-11:30 Panel 2

Elisabeth King (New York University) Ethnic recognition: From Formal Places to Cultural Spaces

Martin CK Chung (Hong Kong Baptist University) Memory-sharing after Power-sharing: Reunification and the Prospects for Normalisation

Altin Gjeta (University of Birmingham) Coercive consociationalism and statehood consolidation in Kosovo 

Miso Dokmanovic (Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje) From Generator of Crisis to an Instrument of Consolidation – Lessons learned from 1991 Macedonian Constitution Transformation

12:30-14:30 Panel 3

Dawn Walsh (UCD) & Stefan Wolff (Univeristy of Birmingham) International involvement in power-sharing peace processes: Lessons from Northern Ireland and beyond

Andreas Juon (ETH Zurich), Terminating the War, Losing the Peace? Constitutional Power-Sharing and Its Discontents

Roberto Belloni (University of Bologna) & Aleksandra Zdeb (University of the National Education Commission, Krakow), Consociational Practice in Bosnia – Towards Illiberal Consociationalism

15:00-17:00 Panel 4

Jon Fraenkel (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) Was Consociational Democracy Buried Beneath the Rubble of Kabul and Baghdad? 

Aleksandra Zdeb (University of the National Education Commission, Krakow) Delusions of liberal consociationalism? Searching for answers in the Western Balkans

Allison McCulloch (Brandon University) Revisiting Power-Sharing as Political Prescription

 17:00 Roundtable Discussion of Takeaways and Ways Forward; Closing remarks