Power Sharing ─ Empirical and Normative Challenges

Power-sharing is a critical political strategy for dealing with protracted conflicts: ultimately, power-sharing facilitates the democratic accommodation of difference. Despite these benefits, myriad criticisms have been launched against the model, ranging from its supposedly illiberal and primordial basis to its alleged inability to produce peace and stability

This edited collection aims to enhance our understanding of the utility of power-sharing in deeply divided societies 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 justice, fairness and democracy?
• Do they do so in ways that promote effective governance?

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 leading and emerging academic proponents of power-sharing to think critically about its weaknesses.

This text will be of key 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.

Allison McCulloch is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brandon University. McCulloch’s research is focused on the politics of deeply divided societies, particularly the design of power-sharing institutions. She has written on the consociationalism-centripetalism debate, the relationship between deliberative democracy and power-sharing, and on the impact of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security in power-sharing systems.

John McGarry is Professor of Political Studies and Canada Research Chair in Nationalism and Democracy in the Department of Political Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. McGarry’s academic work is mainly concerned with the design of political institutions in deeply divided places. He is particularly interested in power-sharing, federalism and other forms of territorial autonomy, but has also worked on the relationship between European integration and minority rights.