Electoral engineering and conflict management in divided societies (I): Fiji and Sri Lanka compared

2001 ◽  
pp. 95-128
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Conflict Management ◽  
Divided Societies

Conflict Management in Divided Societies: The Many Uses of Territorial Self-Governance

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Management ◽  
Management Strategies ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Track Record ◽  
State Construction ◽  
Territorial Control ◽  
The Many

Conflict over territorial control in divided societies is widespread, frequently violent and difficult to resolve, and thus merits systematic analytical and empirical engagement. Extending the discussion of territorial approaches to conflict management in divided societies beyond the usually narrower focus on federation and autonomy, this article develops the concept of territorial self-governance as a form of state construction and conflict management, arguing that it encompasses five distinct arrangements from confederation and federation to federacy, devolution and decentralisation and illustrates their manifestations with examples from 12 countries across three continents. The article establishes and tests a framework to explain their emergence, examines the conditions under which they are combined with other conflict management strategies, such as power sharing, and reflects on their track record of providing stability in divided societies, finding it more promising than its critics allow.

Democracy in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management. By Benjamin Reilly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 232p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 865-866
Author(s):  
Shaheen Mozaffar
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Management ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Single Transferable Vote ◽  
Alternative Vote ◽  
Alternative Position

Benjamin Reilly makes an important contribution to the debate on the appropriate institutional design of electoral systems for mitigating conflict and sustaining democracy in ethnically plural societies. The dominant position in this debate posits the importance of proportional representation (PR) systems. An alternative position, less widely accepted largely because of an ostensible absence of empirical examples, posits the importance of majoritarian preferential systems that encourage cross-ethnic vote pooling. Reilly extends this debate by drawing on heretofore unknown or understudied cases to examine the operation of both majoritarian (the alternative vote or AV and the supplementary vote or SV) and proportional (single-transferable vote or STV) preferential systems in different social contexts and in different elections (legislative and presidential).

scholarly journals Affirmative Action: The U.S. Experience in Comparative Perspective

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sabbagh
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Conflict Management ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Underrepresented Groups ◽  
The Past ◽  
The U.S

Broadly defined, affirmative action encompasses any measure that allocates resources through a process that takes into account individual membership in underrepresented groups. The goal is to increase the proportion of individuals from those groups in positions from which they have been excluded as a result of state-sanctioned oppression in the past or societal discrimination in the present. A comparative overview of affirmative action regimes reveals that the most direct and controversial variety of affirmative action emerged as a strategy for conflict management in deeply divided societies; that the policy tends to expand in scope, either embracing additional groups, encompassing wider realms for the same groups, or both; and that in countries where the beneficiaries are numerical majorities, affirmative action programs are more extensive and their transformative purpose is unusually explicit.

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