The international mediation of power-sharing settlements

Abstract

Power sharing is largely accepted among scholars and policy-makers as a potentially effective mechanism for building peace in the aftermath of violent ethnic conflicts and self-determination disputes. Although the operation of power sharing may be prone to ongoing challenges and even political crises arising from the legacy of the conflict, international actors continue to promote power-sharing arrangements to manage self-determination and other ethnopolitical conflicts. This article investigates the normative and instrumental reasons why third-party mediators (on behalf of international organizations and/or states) turn to power-sharing strategies during peace negotiations. It considers the reasons why third-party mediators promote power sharing when its maintenance is likely to depend on their ongoing commitment and governance involvement. We argue that mediators draw from four different perspectives in their support of power-sharing settlements: international law, regional and internal security, democracy and minority rights, and a technical approach where mediators focus on the mechanics of power-sharing designs. The article draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with officials from the United Nations and the European Union working for the organizations’ respective mediation units as well as documentary analysis of official mediation documents.

How population size affects power-sharing: a comparison of Nigeria and Suriname

“…Interesting in this regard is that power-sharing politics in both countries emerged largely from a homegrown negotiation process rather than an externally mediated endeavour. This sets Suriname and Nigeria apart from many postconflict countries in the 1990s where external actors were strongly involved in consociational engineering through peace agreements, among which Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq, and Northern Ireland, for example (McCulloch & McEvoy, 2018). This of course also has implications for the generalizability of our findings, as discussed in the conclusion.…”

‘Bumps in the Road Ahead’: How External Actors Defuse Power-Sharing Crises

“…Earlier scholarship suggests that external actors may seek to impose power-sharing in keeping with their foreign policy preferences, allowing them to maintain control in regions of geo-strategic interest (Kerr 2005, 7). 2 In contrast, the evidence from our interviews with a range of international mediators highlights a mix of instrumental and normative explanations for why external actors turn to power-sharing in the first instance: as a means for ending violence and promoting internal and regional security, as a middle way between the competing international norms of self-determination and territorial integrity, as a way to extend democracy and minority rights, and as a strategy in support of local actors seeking technical advice on governance arrangements (McCulloch & McEvoy 2018). Often these perspectives dovetail.…”

Understanding Power‐Sharing Performance: A Lifecycle Approach

“…A consociation designed by elites who agree to share power to ward off a more violent fate for all and improve intergroup relations is a wholly different scenario to one in which power‐sharing is imposed by external actors. Although external actors often play an important ‘midwife’ mediation role in bringing about power‐sharing, they will have their own reasons for doing so that may influence the agreement’s functionality (McCulloch and McEvoy 2018).…”