Exclusion amid Inclusion: Power-Sharing and Non-Dominant Minorities

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In 2009 the European Court of Human Rights ruled 14-3 that Bosnia-Herzegovina's election rules for its tripartite presidency, which allow only Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Serbs to stand for election, were discriminatory against other minority groups, namely the Roma and Jewish communities. This is because Bosnia's constitutional framework, alongside the presidential arrangement, is designed to accommodate and include the three constituent peoples but not members who prefer not to identify in terms of three ethnic groups. While this was thought necessary to end the 1992-5 war (Weller and Wolff 2005), it has forestalled the consolidation of democracy and has marginalised individuals and groups who do not identify with the three dominant communities. As Jakob Finci, the leader of Bosnia's Jewish community who took the case to the ECHR, noted in response to the ruling, Bosnia's institutional rules are "a problem of injustice that divides Bosnian people into first and second class citizens" (Balkanist 2015). Power-sharing, which entails the representation and participation of major societal (ethnic) actors in the process of governing, has been adopted in places as diverse as Burundi, Lebanon, Kosovo, Macedonia, Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq and has facilitated a war-to-peace transition in some of the world's most deeply divided places. However, while power-sharing is often heralded as a democratic and inclusive approach to managing ethnic difference, it faces a significant trade-off. For power-sharing to create stability and pacify the divided groups, it must marginalise those actors who were not directly involved in conflict, who we refer to as non-dominant groups. As part of this project, we identify three kinds of non-dominant groups who were neglected in the original design of power-sharing institutions and remain on the sidelines of postconflict politics: non-ethnic minorities, re-aligned minorities, and micro-minorities. We refer to this institutional bias in favour of large groups as the "exclusion amid inclusion" (EAI) dilemma. We seek to answer the following research question: How can power-sharing arrangements best be implemented to account for the EAI problem? This research project is designed to confront the EAI dilemma and offer feasible and viable recommendations for its resolution. We seek to answer the following research question: How can power-sharing arrangements best be implemented to account for the EAI problem? We answer this question through a threefold methodological approach. We shall conduct 1) a macro-political analysis of power-sharing institutions to assess their ability to redress the EAI dilemma, 2) four comparative case studies (Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon and Macedonia) investigating the relationship between the inclusion of dominant groups and the exclusion of non-dominant groups, employing a "structured, focused" method of comparison (George and Bennett 2005), and 3) semi-structured interviews with politicians from parties that participate in power-sharing and from parties that struggle for legislative representation, community activists from the three kinds of non-dominant groups identified, and representatives of international organisations engaged in democracy promotion and conflict resolution. Overall, we assess the experiences of states engaged in power-sharing in order to develop a series of policy proposals for modifying the institutional framework to accommodate identity groups that have either been marginalised under the initial institutional design, or who have emerged during the period of peace. This is of timely relevance: our conceptual framework can be extended to societies beyond our comparative cases where peace is marred by episodic violence, frozen conflict, and/or active violent conflict between the dominant groups, but also affecting the non-dominant groups.