Negotiating Ethnic Conflict in Deeply Divided Societies: Political Bargaining and Power Sharing as Institutional Strategies

Abstract

With interest in social institutions expanding, and the centering of attention on state as an institution that is essentially cultural, a major interest in recent literature on ethnicity studies is on people, communities, and societies -(i) as collective actors in relation with the state as the sovereign authority and (ii) the process of interface between the state and the ethnic groups that constitute the ethno-demographic profile of the state. This, on one hand, has brought a shift in the focus on state and the modern state-system in studies on ethnic conflict, from the conventional perspective that viewed ethnic conflicts as a condition under