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 in Queen’s University Belfast, October 16-18, 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.

Depending on the interest, and participants’ availability, we also consider submitting a panel to the Political Science Association Ireland annual conference which takes place October 18-20 in Dublin. See here, https://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/news&events/events/psai2024/

Submit your abstract here https://form.jotform.com/tagarin/consociational-democracy-the-end by Monday July 15.