Ethnic regional autonomies as complex institutional systems: institutionalizing ethnic peace (original) (raw)

The paper seeks to establish the relations between specific institutional features of ethnic territorial autonomy and its pacifying effects. The heated debate on the political effects of territorial autonomy arrangements and its ability to pacify, contain, and dissolve ethnic conflicts has entered a new phase in the last decade: the proponents of power-sharing approach have argued that allowing ethnic groups to participate in decision-making process and endowing them with limited selfgovernance would change their preferences and behavior. On the opposite side, critiques believe that power-sharing mechanisms reinforce detached ethnic identity, hence, preventing conflict settlement. Grounding on institutional approach, this paper assumes an ethnic territorial autonomy as complex and dynamic institutional arrangements for power-sharing with multiple institutional arenas and policy domains. Since it is crucial to disaggregate autonomies into more observable units of analysis, the origin...

Where the lines of an armed conflict coincide with ethnic boundaries, the political salience of ethnicity increases. In post-conflict situations that may seem defined by ‘ancient hatreds’, the political salience and character of ethnic identities remain dynamic. Bringing together contributions from the comparative politics literature on power-sharing and the policy-dominated field of post-conflict peacebuilding, this article examines how ethnic divisions have been addressed in recent cases of institution-building directed by international forces following military intervention – in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It finds that an ‘assumption of intransigence’ has often influenced decisions on institutional design, and that the institutionalization of ethnicity has become an important hindrance to peacebuilding. Against this background, the article argues in favor of institutional designs that do not fixate the accentuation on ethnicity in politics: more flexible ways should be sought to assure inclusivity and representativeness for different ethnic groups. There exists a wide range of institutional-design options that can be combined, on the basis of in-depth assessments of each individual conflict, to de-ethnicize politics and build sustainable peace.

This article develops a classification of institutions for the regulation of ethnic conflict by focusing on three sets of challenges for institutional design in ethnically divided societies: state construction, the institutions of governments, and the rights and identities of groups and individuals. It examines existing prescriptions in three main schools of ethnic conflict regulation (centripetalism, consociationalism, and power dividing) in light of these institutional design challenges and contextualises them empirically with reference to ethnic conflict regulation practice in the Western Balkans over the past fifteen years. Finding a significant mix of institutions from across the three theories of ethnic conflict regulation, the article proposes to conceptualise this practice as ‘complex power sharing’ and proposes a research agenda to develop and test a more comprehensive theory of complex power sharing.

Despite significant advances in the disaggregation of the study of civil conflict and inter-ethnic violence, intra-ethnic violence remains understudied. In this paper, we present the first systematic, cross-national analysis of the conditions that promote violent, fragmentary conflict within politically active ethnic minorities. We propose a model of intra-ethnic conflict in which collective violence is produced by the interaction between sub-group entrepreneurs and the suppressive actions of the state. This two-level model predicts a curvilinear relationship between the relative size of an ethnic minority and its probability of experiencing large-scale intra-ethnic conflict. Additional hypotheses based on the proposed causal mechanism are also posited. These hypotheses are tested with panel data on 274 politically active ethnic minorities in 115 countries, using a combination of parametric and semi-parametric regression techniques. The results strongly confirm the predicted curvili...

A definitive global survey of the interaction of race, ethnicity, nationalism and politics, this handbook blends theoretically grounded, rigorous analysis with empirical illustrations, to provide a state-of-the art overview of the contemporary debates on one of the most pervasive international security challenges today. The contributors to this volume offer a 360-degree perspective on ethnic conflict: from the theoretical foundations of nationalism and ethnicity, to the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict, and to the various strategies adopted in response to it. Without privileging any specific explanation of why ethnic conflict happens at a specific place and time or why attempts at preventing or settling it might fail or succeed, the Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict enables readers to gain better insights into such defining moments in post-Cold War international history as the disintegrations of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and their respective consequences and the genocide in Rwanda, as well as the relative success of conflict settlement efforts in Northern Ireland, Macedonia, and Aceh. By contributing to understanding the varied and multiple causes of ethnic conflicts and to learning from the successes and failures of its prevention and settlement, the Handbook makes a powerful case that ethnic conflicts are neither unavoidable nor unresolvable, but rather that they require careful analysis and thoughtful and measured responses.