Exclusion Amid Inclusion: Power-Sharing and Non-Dominant Minorities, 2018-2019

In the search for democratic solutions to global conflicts over the last two decades, one model of post-conflict governance has prevailed. power-sharing. Consociational power-sharing entails the representation and participation of major societal groups in the process of governing. Governmance based on consociational principles has facilitated war-to-peace transition in some of the world's most deeply divided places, from Burundi to Lebanon, Kosovo, Macedonia, Northern ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq. Yet, while consociational power-sharing has been heralded as a democratic and inclusive approach to managing ethnic difference, it faces a significant trade-off. For the system to stabilise and pacify divided societies, it must marginalise those actors who were not directly involved in the conflict. By making inclusion of the dominant groups in society central to democratic governance, power-sharing excludes other groups who align with alternative identities. Our project addressed this inherent dilemma in power-sharing of exclusion amid inclusion (EAI Dilemma). We have investigated the institutional bias in power-sharing systems in favour of large groups over “non-dominant minorities” who are not explicitly included in the settlement, such as non-ethnic collectives, women and migrant communities. This project sought solutions to this democratic deficit in post-conflict societies. from over 100 interviews with primarily, political elites and members of civil society across Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Lebanon and North Macedonia we identifed how power-sharing arrangements can be designed, refined and improved in ways that address the EAI problem.