Challenges to Power‐Sharing in the Post‐Uprisings Arab World

Volume 20, Issue 2

This special feature grew out of a workshop which gathered together experts on consociational power‐sharing from a comparative perspective. Our aim was to reflect theoretically and normatively on this specific type of democratic power‐sharing – in contrast to centripetalism, multiculturalism, and territorial pluralism (O’Leary 2013), take stock of its empirical record in Lebanon and Iraq, and interrogate its potential utility for other postwar states and societies in the Arab World after the popular uprisings. Consociational power‐sharing’s main institutional features to promote peace and stability in plural societies or postwar divided places consist of a grand coalition, mutual veto, proportionality, and segmental autonomy (Lijphart 1977).

What this parsimonious formula means in practice in different contexts is 1) any variation of a cross‐community executive gathering political elite representatives along ethnic, religious, or sectarian lines, whether of the grand coalition, concurrent executive, or plurality executive types; 2) specified or unspecified veto power on decisions that may affect the political balance of power or infringe on the cultural identity of the different ethnic or sectarian groups; 3) some form of proportionality in the distribution of public offices and resources, and hence a preference for Proportional Representation (PR) electoral laws; and, finally, 4) territorial or non‐territorial community self‐governance particularly on matters pertaining to cultural identity and family law (McCulloch and McGarry 2017; O’Leary 2013).

Read the editor’s introduction here.

Read the full issue here.

Is Nation ‘One of the Most Puzzling and Tendentious Items in the Political Lexicon’?

By Cyril Jayet

Volume 19, Issue 2, pages 152-169

The aim of this paper is to clarify the meaning of the concept of nation, which has often been described as a puzzling concept. I propose first to analyse various definitions of nation, focusing on whether they imply that nations exist and what this means if so, or in what sense they exist. I distinguish four ways of approaching this. I evidence the shortcomings of each approach, and argue that the best one is that proposed by Brubaker: to focus on nationalization as a process and on nationness as a variable, rather than on ‘nations’ as discrete groups. Second, I show how this approach can benefit from Rosch’s theory of categorization, Gellner’s definition of nationalism, and Mann’s theory of the centralization of the state. Finally, I argue that what Gellner called the ‘weakness of nationalism’ explains the puzzle of ‘nations’: although nationalization contributes to shaping society according to the principle of nationalism, it only succeeds to a certain degree, leaving nations always unfinished and impossible to identify clearly.

Read the full article here.