Penn Program in Ethnic Conflict - Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar: Power-Sharing in Deeply Divided Places

Description

The Penn Program in Ethnic Conflict was created in 2007 to advance research, education, practice, and policy-relevant study in ethnic group conflict and political violence. The mission of the Program is to sustain and enhance the efforts of social scientists to identify the origins, trajectory and impact of violent intergroup struggles. The Penn Program in Ethnic Conflict hosts an Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar focusing on power-sharing as a political formula to calm deeply divided places, i.e. countries wracked by national, ethnic and communal conflict. Power-sharing is a standard prescription for protracted conflicts in deeply divided territories, especially when there are antagonistic self-determination claims. But no sensible advocate of power-sharing assumes it is a universally appropriate panacea. Commending power-sharing has to be feasible as well as desirable. We will ask “what are the possible forms of power-sharing that are compatible with democratic and humane pluralist values”? And we shall address what makes power-sharing work. Do power-sharing systems require certain psychological, cultural, sociological pre-requisites, or historical antecedents? We will consider what makes power-sharing systems likely to fail, or what makes them redundant, and consider their pathologies as well as their virtues.