How power-sharing has to adapt - lessons from Northern Ireland, Belgium and Cyprus
In a new book published today, conflict resolution experts at the University of Kent explain how, to be successful, power-sharing has to adapt to changes in the political landscape.
Using three European countries - Northern Ireland, Belgium (Brussels Capital Region) and Cyprus - as examples, co-authors Professor Feargal Cochrane, Professor Neophytos Loizides and Thibaud Bodsen use personal experience of each of their native countries to demonstrate where reform has helped build trust and consensus.
Entitled Mediating Power-Sharing: Devolution and Consociationalism in Deeply Divided Societies the book highlights a classic problem for divided societies namely, how to accommodate political divisions on the one hand, while also trying to transcend them on the other.
Throughout the book, the authors highlight this problem and present new thinking about how to provide institutional safeguards for divided communities while also retaining the capacity to move into new post conflict spaces.Their research evaluates how ideas surrounding power-sharing have changed incrementally within each case study. The unifying argument within the book is that power-sharing has to have the capacity to evolve and adapt to changing political circumstances that inevitably follow negotiated political agreements. The authors argue that with the correct set of conditions that allow power-sharing systems to adapt, evolve, and incorporate dispute mechanisms that respond to their local context, these conditions represent the most viable approach to political institution building available to deeply divided societies today. Mediating Power-Sharing: Devolution and Consociationalism in Deeply Divided Societies by Feargal Cochrane and Neophytos Loizides, of the University's School of Politics and International Relations, and Thibaud Bodson, a Kent alumnus currently completing his PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, is published by Routledge, January 2018.
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