Consociational Power‐Sharing in the Arab World: A Critical Stocktaking

Abstract

The aim of this special feature is to reflect theoretically and normatively on consociational power-sharing, take stock of its empirical record in Lebanon and Iraq, and interrogate its potential utility for other postwar states and societies in the Arab World following the popular uprisings. Allison McCulloch and Joanne McEvoy open the collection by deploying the 'lifecycle' heuristic to explain consociationalism's mixed record as an institutional strategy to manage ethnic or sectarian conflict in different contexts. This process-oriented approach allows them to shift the consociational debate towards greater sensitivity to contexts: how macro-institutional types such as liberal and corporate consociation interact with formal and informal micro-institutional rules in determining the success or failure of consociational power-sharing arrangements. Paul Dixon and Ibrahim Halawi follow with critical evaluations of consociationalism's embedded violence against alternative political economic choices. Dixon's radical critique is chiefly aimed at how consociationalism precludes the emergence of alternative identities, political choices, and socioeconomic struggles. Halawi magnifies this critique and considers elite consociational arrangements in the Arab World to be exclusionary and counter-revolutionary. The contributions by John Nagle and Toby Dodge converge on how the institutional architecture of consociational power-sharing as observed in Lebanon and Iraqwhether through formal or informal rules, corporate or liberal arrangementscreates a host of distortions that ossify identities, shape modes of political mobilization, and eviscerate state institutions by turning them into clientelist platforms. Finally, Steven Heydemann and Simon Mabon explore prospects for consociational power-sharing in Syria and Bahrain, respectively, with implications for postwar Libya and perhaps Yemen. Although in both cases