Complex Power-Sharing *
Resolving Self-Determination Disputes through Complex Power-Sharing
Aims
This project seeks to both present and analyse novel ways of overcoming self-determination conflicts through complex power-sharing arrangements. Situated at the interface between international law and politics, this project considers recent cases of attempted settlements: Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Gagauzia/Moldova, South Ossetia/Georgia, Bougainville/Papua New Guinea and Mindanao/Philippines.
The overarching aim of the project is to gain an understanding of how complex power-sharing arrangements operate and what their success and failure depend upon. On the basis of these conclusions, the project hopes to generate practical policy recommendations for future negotiators of complex power-sharing arrangements.
The project also aims to advance existing power-sharing theory beyond the traditional consociationalist-integrationist divide and highlight the multi-level complexity of contemporary power-sharing practice.
Relevance
Over the past decade the number of self-determination disputes throughout the world has grown rapidly, and various international actors have been deployed to help resolve them. These have tended to attempt to either bring about effective proportional representation of the conflicting groups or seek their integration. More recently, attempts to resolve such disputes have become more complex, seeking to construct multi-layered regimes of power-sharing across a broad range of public authority and in response to varying circumstances. There has until now been little examination of these innovations. This project is an attempt to plug that research gap and provide recommendations to guide future policy.
Project Outputs
The project will yield two books. The first book covers the eight case studies. Each individual case study analyses the genealogy of the complex power-sharing agreement and its implementation across various layers of public authority. The second volume will take a comparative approach to key structural issues which cut across all case studies and include, inter alia, democratic practices, the administration of justice, economic policies and the protection of human and minority rights.
Preliminary Findings
A key discovery of the project thus far is that all settlements examined feature a mixture of consociational, integrative and autonomy-based elements. Indeed, across all the case studies the project has detected a subtle mix of structures of co-decision by ethnic groups (consociation), areas of principal decision by ethnic groups (autonomy, territorial or functional), mechanisms that are meant to encourage public decisions on the basis of interests, rather than appurtenance to an ethnic group (integrative), the application of safeguard mechanisms (human and minority rights), the application of dispute settlement mechanisms in cases of contested hierarchies of authority, and the involvement of the international layer of decision-making.
The international involvement varies greatly in all eight case studies. However, certain aspects feature prominently when evaluating the impact of international involvement on a complex power-sharing situation. The lack of democratic scrutiny of the international administration in the case of Bosnia and Kosovo, for instance, seems to explain some of the obstacles for a successful implementation of the respective complex power-sharing arrangement. This leads to the question whether local ownership is at risk when international involvement is too prominent and what long-term effects this has.
As the case studies under consideration cover a diverse range of political situations from post-war transition, protracted civil war, post-communism transition to nation-building, each creates a widely differing set of pre-conditions for either an imposed or a negotiated settlement.
Links with other Institutions
This project is a joint initiative of the Centre of International Studies of the University of Cambridge, the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law, Cambridge, and the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI). The project has created an active network of internationally renowned scholars and practitioners in the field of complex power-sharing. In all, the project involves more than 20 authors, 8 case-study consultants and five permanent consultants. While many of these are based at the three institutions involved, a significant number have been drawn from other institutions across the globe.
Funding
Funding for the project has come from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Follow-up project
In spring 2003, the Carnegie Corporation of New York announced that they would be funding a follow-up project that aims to apply lessons of recent power-sharing settlements to emerging unresolved self-determination issues. This new project is envisaged to be one in which the lessons of the first project are applied to new self-determination disputes through the activities of small project teams drawn from the active network of senior academics and practitioners working on power-sharing issues.
Further information
For further information, see the project website.
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