Mediating Power-Sharing: Devolution and Consociationalism in Deeply Divided Societies

This book will focus on Power-Sharing in deeply divided societies. Beyond this starting point, the book seeks to examine the different ways in which consociational institutions emerge from negotiations and peace settlements across three carefully chosen cases –Northern Ireland, the Brussels Capital Region and Cyprus. Across each of the chapters, the analysis will assess how the design of these various forms of power-sharing demonstrates similarity, difference and complexity in how power-sharing has been conceived and operated within each of these contexts. Finally, a key objective of the book will be to explore and evaluate how ideas surrounding power-sharing have evolved and changed incrementally within each of the empirical contexts. The uniting argument within the book is that consociational power-sharing has to have the capacity to adapt to changing political circumstances, and that this can be achieved through the interplay of formal and informal micro-level refinements to these institutions and the procedures that govern them, that allow such institutions to evolve over time in ways that increase their utility as conflict transformation governance structures for deeply divided societies.