Laurence Cooley

Changing the Rules of the Game: Comparing FIFA/UEFA and EU Attempts to Promote Reform of Power-Sharing Institutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina

This article compares two international attempts to promote reform of power-sharing institutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina: failed European Union-led efforts to promote reform of the countrys constitution, which was established by the 1995 Dayton Agreement; and the recent successful reform of Bosnia-Herzegovinas institutions of football governance, promoted by the games international and European governing bodies, FIFA and UEFA. The article outlines the history of these two reform processes and seeks to explain why FIFA and UEFA have been more successful in promoting reform in this post-conflict setting than the EU. It argues that, in contrast to the EU, which has been vague about the precise reforms expected of Bosnia-Herzegovinas politicians, leaving the details to be negotiated by domestic political elites, FIFA and UEFA were more precise in their demands and were also willing to capitalise on popular frustration with the governance of the sport and to bypass nationalist elites who stood in the way of reform.

Population Politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Reply to Bochsler and Schläpfer

Abstract In this reply to Daniel Bochsler and Basil Schläpfer, a number of issues prompted by their article ‘An indirect approach to map ethnic identities in post-conflict societies’, which proposes a method to estimate population shares in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in light of the lack of data on ethnicity from the most recent Bosnian census, are raised. In particular, two concerns are highlighted: firstly, whether estimates of the ethnic composition of the population can be free from the same politics that has affected the census itself; and secondly, what the practical purpose of producing such estimates might be.

Consociation in a Constant State of Contingency? The case of the Palestinian Territory

Abstract It has become common to regard consociational democracy as a method of managing conflict in ethnically divided societies but little attention has been paid to its applicability to societies where the primary political cleavage is between secular and religious forces. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by examining the applicability of consociationalism to the case of the Palestinian Territory. We argue that, while Palestinian society is characterised by ‘pillarisation’ along a secularist/Islamist cleavage, formal power-sharing between the representatives of the two main Palestinian factions, namely Fatah and Hamas, has proved elusive. However, rather than seeking to explain the seeming inability of the factions to share power by reference to the nature of the cleavage, as other authors have done, we instead highlight the contextual factors that have made power sharing difficult to achieve, namely the difficulties Hamas and Fatah face in accepting each other as political partners, and opposition from external actors.

The governance of sport in deeply divided societies: Actors and institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Northern Ireland

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The European Minority Rights Regime: Towards a Theory of Regime Effectiveness

In the past decade, spurred on by the 2004 and 2007 eastern enlargements of the European Union, literature on the impact of the Union and of other supranational organizations on minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe has proliferated, seemingly without an end in sight. One might therefore wonder whether David Galbreath and Joanne McEvoy’s The European Minority Rights Regime simply contributes to supply outstripping demand. Thankfully such concern would be misplaced, since readers of the book are spared duplication and rewarded instead with an account of the development and effectiveness of a minority rights regime that both complements and advances the existing literature. The originality of Galbreath and McEvoy’s contribution to our understanding of the promotion of minority rights policies in Central and Eastern Europe stems from their decision to employ a regime theory approach in order to examine the effectiveness of the promotion of minority rights in the region. Central to their argument is that by adopting insights from a theoretical approach that has so far been employed by international relations scholars seeking to explain international cooperation over issues such as communications or the environment, we can gain a better understanding of the role of power, interests and knowledge in the emergence and operation of the European minority rights regime. The book follows a logical structure, moving from the development of the authors’ regime theory approach, through an outline of the historical background to the European minority rights regime, to a number of more empirical chapters that shed light on the coherence, effectiveness and implementation of European minority rights norms. The early chapters set out a number of hypotheses, which are subsequently tested through extensive engagement with three case-study countries: Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania. Galbreath and McEvoy’s first three hypotheses are that international regimes are more effective when international norms find salience in domestic politics, when international organization mechanisms ensure implementation rather than simply formal adoption, and when there is overlap that produces cooperation between organizations. Their final hypothesis is that states themselves aid regime effectiveness if and when implementation is perceived to meet domestic preferences. The analysis conducted by the authors suggests that while minority rights norms have proved to be domestically salient in the states under consideration, they have also been the subject of a significant degree of contestation, with a gap existing between the expectations of minority groups and the willingness of state actors to implement extensive minority rights provisions. Moreover, Galbreath and McEvoy argue that while EU Ethnopolitics, Vol. 11, No. 2, 229–234, June 2012