Timothy D. Sisk

Power sharing and international mediation in ethnic conflicts

Can power sharing prevent violent ethnic conflict? And if so, how can the international community best promote that outcome?In this concise volume, Timothy Sisk defines power sharing as practices and institutions that result in broad-based governing coalitions generally inclusive of all major ethnic groups. He identifies the principal approaches to power sharing, including autonomy, federations, and proportional electoral systems.In addition, Sisk highlights the problems with various power-sharing approaches and practices that have been raised by scholars and practitioners alike, and the instances where power-sharing experiments have succeeded and where they have failed. Finally, he offers some guidance to policymakers as they ponder power-sharing arrangements.

Peacemaking in Civil Wars

In the past decade, many more armed conflicts than before ended at the negotiating table instead of on the battlefield. Over the course of the entire twentieth century, very few conflicts, about one in five, were settled in peace talks; one side or the other eventually emerged victorious and imposed a peace on the vanquished. However, in the period 1990–2000 as much as half of the armed conflicts that ended were silenced as a result of a negotiated agreement, nearly a threefold increase over the previous era. The more assertive role taken by the international community in peacemaking is at least one reason for this change of trend in war termination. Greater consensus among the great powers enabled more vigorous United Nations and regional peacemaking (or mediation), leading to a higher proportion of negotiated settlements. This chapter analyses three sets of findings emanating from peacemaking in the civil wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Power-sharing after Civil Wars: Matching Problems to Solutions

The trend towards negotiated settlements in civil wars in the 1990s and 2000s, as opposed to military victories, has now become clear. In 2000, Wallensteen and Sollenberg reported that of the 108 conflicts since 1989, 75 have ended by 1998. ‘Of these’, they write, ‘21 were ended by peace agreements, whereas 24 ended in victory for one of the sides and 30 had other outcomes (ceasefire agreements or activity below the level for inclusion). Many new peace agreements were signed in the middle and late parts of the period, particularly 1995–1996.’1 The trend of conflicts ending in peace agreements rather than on the battlefield persisted into the 2000s such that by 2006 the Uppsala project reported that 34 per cent of the conflicts in the post-Cold War period (1990–2005) as a whole ended in negotiated settlement, double the historical average; between 2000 and 2005 there were nearly quadruple the number of conflicts ending in negotiation than by military victories (16 to 4). Starkly, in the 1990s, more conflicts (41) ended in negotiated settlements than through outright military victory (23).2

Power-Sharing in Civil War: Puzzles of Peacemaking and Peacebuilding

Syrias slide into sectarian civil war in 2011 raises a new fundamental knowledge question about the conditions under which power-sharing pacts can be clinched as an approach to war termination. When intrastate conflicts escalate into violent sectarian struggles, power-sharing is a likely basis of an eventual political settlement in situations where partition is off the table. This article contends that there remain two puzzling knowledge gaps about power-sharing as the basis for peace agreements to end civil wars: first, the specific conditions under which elites find it in their own interest to share power with bitter adversaries rather than fight on the battlefield, and second, how war-ending elite-negotiated pacts may evolve into more enduring social contracts. These puzzles, critical for policymakers and still unresolved in the scholarly literature, suggest the need to develop more contingent- and context-specific knowledge if research findings are to more capably contribute to peacemaking efforts.

Electoral system choice in South Africa: Implications for intergroup moderation

The article assesses the adoption of a proportional representation electoral system for South Africas first post‐apartheid election, held 26–28 April 1994. The performance of the electoral system chosen for this election ‐ a form of party list proportional representation with regional and national features ‐ is argued to be an important, if not critical, element of building successful democratic post‐apartheid political institutions in this deeply divided society. The article analyses the potential conflict‐mitigating effects of electoral system choice in South Africa, particularly the question of whether or not the electoral system contained incentives for moderation by office‐seekers across ethnic and racial cleavages during the 1994 election campaign, thereby promoting intergroup co‐operation and reconciliation.

Review article: perspectives on South Africa's transition: implications for democratic consolidation

Friedman, Steven, ed. 1993. The Long Journey: South Africas Quest for a Negotiated Settlement. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Ottaway, Marina. 1993. South Africa: The Struggle for a New Order. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution Stedman, Stephen, ed. 1994. South Africa: The Political Economy of Transformation. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Peacebuilding for Social Cohesion: Findings and Implications

In this chapter, Cox, Orsborn, and Sisk present cross-case findings from the research. Findings are organized in sections devoted to understanding the various ways ethnic, religious, or sectarian violence affects social cohesion. Among the topics are “ethnic security dilemmas” that stoke fear and diminish social trust and inter-group cooperation, the politics of demography and the spatial distribution of groups, narratives on constructing the “nation,” the effects of institutional rules to mitigate divisive politics, the political economy of identity-based service delivery, language policy and national identity, and the myths and realities of national-level inclusivity agendas. The chapter includes analysis of key peacebuilding issues, including how internal and external peacebuilders talk about social cohesion (while often avoiding sensitive language on ethnicity and religion), dilemmas of empowerment efforts to remediate historical marginalization, direct dialogue approaches to foster cohesion (e.g. “national dialogue” processes), indirect approaches to promote inter-group interdependencies, the design and implementation of peace architectures, assistance to government approaches to build social cohesion, and the enduring problems of coordination, “local ownership,” and aid volatility.

Peacebuilding: A Social Cohesion Approach

In this chapter, Cox and Sisk present and define the concept of social cohesion, particularly in relation to the literatures on peacebuilding, and religious and ethnic fragmentation. Much of the literature on peacebuilding in deeply divided societies concludes that peacebuilding efforts are fraught with dilemmas, trade-offs, and conundrums with a significant risk that some types of programs, policies, and initiatives designed to foster social cohesion may result in more harm than good. Cox and Sisk introduce an innovative, country-level assessment guide on social cohesion and development cooperation that serves as the basis for comparative case-study analysis of peacebuilding efforts in seven deeply divided societies, including Guatemala, Kenya, Lebanon, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka.

Nepal: Identity Politics in a Turbulent Transition

Bogati, Cox, Karki, and Sisk find that Nepal’s post–civil war transition remains turbulent and fragile due to shifting governing coalitions, localized political violence, and, most poignantly, the increase of identity-based politics. Identity differences have a religious and cultural basis in the Hindu caste system and continue to define political loyalties. While civil war has not reignited, Nepal faces continued conflict along identity lines related to historical patterns of exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination. Despite innovative work among international donors engaged in fostering social cohesion, identity-based grievances in Nepal make debates around social transformation, federalism, resource allocation, and democratization vulnerable to highly localized outbreaks of violence. Peacebuilding in Nepal requires a long-term perspective. With major setbacks of the 2015 earthquake and the escalation of conflict around in the Tarai region related to the new constitution, a broad network of domestic and international actors remains committed to re-imagining society and transforming the state.

Peacekeeping in Peril: The First 65 Years

In 1988, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its prestigious prize for peace to United Nations (UN) Peacekeeping Forces: at the time, UN ‘blue helmets’ were romantically lauded by the Committee as having contributed to reducing tensions during ceasefires by providing third-party guarantees – or at least serving as the external ‘eyes and ears’ of the international community – in the implementation of fragile peace agreements. Moreover, the Nobel Committee argued that peacekeeping forces were ‘recruited from among the young people of many nations, who, in keeping with their ideals, voluntarily take on a demanding and hazardous service in the cause of peace’. Then Secretary General Perez de Cuellar, accepting the prize, argued that peacekeeping ‘introduces into the military sphere the principle of non-violence’. Little did the Norwegians know in 1988 that that there would be soon a seismic shift in the international system with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, a shift that portended a change in the nature of conflict globally from international disputes and Cold-war fuelled proxy wars to mostly internal or civil war which continues well into the twenty-first century. In reflection of these deep-seated changes in the international order, UN peacekeeping would see in the early 1990s a rapid, fundamental, and broad transformation in the extent, mandate, and challenges of external intervention in such conflicts such