Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801489741 ISBN 13: 9780801489747

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2005

Synopsis

How can leaders craft political institutions that will sustain the peace and foster democracy in ethnically divided societies after conflicts as destructive as civil wars? Under turbulent conditions the leaders of ethnic groups, governments, and international organizations face the challenge of designing political arrangements that can simultaneously meet the tests of equal representation, democratic accountability, effective governance, and political stability. At critical junctures in the transition from intense (often violent) conflict, power-sharing arrangements may offer a compromise acceptable to most ethnic elites.

Philip G. Roeder and Donald Rothchild find that these short-term accommodations come with high longer-term costs: the very institutions that provide a basis to end a conflict in an ethnically divided country may hinder the consolidation of peace and democracy over the longer term. The contributors to Sustainable Peace examine institutional settlements in Ethiopia, Lebanon, India, and South Africa as well as the Soviet successor states, south Asia, central Africa, west Africa, and the Balkans. Roeder, Rothchild, and most of the contributors conclude that power-dividing, rather than power-sharing, solutions are more likely to result in durable political compacts and peace.

Contributors: Amit Ahuja, University of Michigan; Eduardo Alemán, University of Houston; Valerie Bunce, Cornell University; Caroline Hartzell, Gettysburg College; Matthew Hoddie, Texas A&M University; Edmond J. Keller, UCLA; David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego; Benjamin Reilly, Australian National University; Philip G. Roeder, University of California, San Diego; Donald Rothchild, University of California, Davis; Timothy D. Sisk, University of Denver; Lahra Smith, UCLA; Christoph Stefes, University of Colorado, Denver; Daniel Treisman, UCLA; Ashutosh Varshney, University of Michigan; Stephen Watts, Cornell University; Marie-Joëlle Zahar, Université de Montréal

About this title

Review:

"Those of us who write about civil wars and intrastate conflict must now consider the innovative insights of Sustainable Peace, particularly its rejections of power sharing as a panacea. Philip G. Roeder and Donald Rothchild tease out better, novel, ideas from a range of important cases. We cannot neglect their findings."―Robert I. Rotberg, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

"Sustainable Peace will be a must-read for any academic working in the field of ethnic conflict management. Nowhere has the theory of 'power-division' been put forward as comprehensively and as clearly as in this volume. It is certain, therefore, to have a major impact. The collection is global in its scope, with cases from a rich variety of different geographic regions."―John McGarry, Queen's University

About the Author:

Philip Roeder is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Roeder has published books on Kremlin politics and the failure of the Soviet state, the incomplete post-Soviet transitions to democracy, and national-secession disputes and conflicts around the world. His articles have appeared in such journals as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, and International Studies Quarterly.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0801489741
• ISBN 13: 9780801489747
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: Roeder Philip G., Rothchild Donald