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

ABSTRACT

Power-sharing is a governance approach favoured by external actors for building state capacity and legitimacy in post-conflict societies. Yet it can be unstable and crisis-prone, compelling external actors to guide cross-community cooperation. Why and how do external actors seek to maintain power-sharing and prevent its collapse when operational difficulties emerge? We explore the distinction between ‘light touch’ and ‘heavy hand’ techniques and the motivations of external actors in defusing power-sharing crises. We find a trade-off between the short-term value of crisis management (‘putting out fires’) and the long-term objectives of sustainable local arrangements and external exit (local actors ‘going it alone’).

KEYWORDS:

• Power-sharing
• external actors
• peacebuilding
• consociationalism
• political crisis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Allison McCulloch is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brandon University, Canada. Her research considers the design of power-sharing institutions in deeply divided societies. Specifically, she is interested in the incentives for ethnopolitical moderation and extremism that power sharing offers and how power sharing can be made more inclusive of identities beyond the ethnonational divide.

Joanne McEvoy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Her research interests focus on institutional design in post-conflict states, particularly the capacity of power sharing to promote peace and democracy. She also has a wider interest in the role of external actors in peacebuilding.

ORCID

Allison McCulloch http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8670-9496

Notes

1 The relevant actors are the British and Irish governments (Northern Ireland), the European Union and the Office of the High Representative (Bosnia) and the US and the UN (Iraq). The wider literature on mediation explores the significance of mediator characteristics in bringing about agreement between disputing parties, often framed as a distinction between neutral and biased mediators (Svensson 2009). The external actors considered here are very different in terms of their historical relationships with the respective cases and none could be considered to be neutral (e.g. the issue of British sovereignty in Northern Ireland, the EU integration process in the Western Balkans, the US as an occupying power in Iraq). Despite these differences in historical relationships, however, the external actors employ similar strategies in their efforts to defuse power-sharing crises.

2 While there is certainly merit in the contention that external actors prefer strategies that enable them to maintain a dominant role in strategically important regions, power-sharing, given its crisis-prone nature, is not likely to be their first preference for achieving and maintaining this dominance. This is so for two reasons: first, in each of our cases, power-sharing was only arrived at once it became clear that some form of control was untenable, suggesting that it is often not the desired outcome; second, since new wave cases often bring power-sharing partners together only reluctantly, contributing to crisis politics, external actors often find themselves intervening more often than they anticipated but also, often with a heavier hand than they originally planned, thus requiring them to expend more energy and resources than desired.

3 Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution stipulated that the issue of the disputed territories be resolved by end 2017 following a period of normalization, a population census and referendum. The failure of the Baghdad government to implement Article 140 was viewed by Kurds as ‘a betrayal that violated both the spirit and letter of the new constitution’ (Anderson 2013, 368).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 430-2016-00288].