Power-Sharing: The Need to Explore the “Who” and the “Where”

Power-sharing provisions have been included in many peace agreements intended to end intra-state violent conflict, including, for example, in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Sudan, and Lebanon. Power-sharing has been subject to extensive scholarly examination. Many of these examinations focus on the impact of power-sharing on peace, often defined as the non-recurrence of violent conflict. However, the results of these examinations have not generated a consensus as to the value of power-sharing as a conflict management tool. This lack of consensus highlights a need to more clearly understand the effects of power-sharing. To fully comprehend the role of power-sharing, we must move away from simply asking if it is associated with the reoccurrence of violence and explore the paths through which it can contribute to different outcomes of interest, for example, group relations or stable government. Both Hartzell and Mehler (2019) and Keil and McCulloch (2021) seek to address this current weakness in our understanding of power-sharing, albeit in quite different ways. These books show that by paying closer attention to the impact of power-sharing on different outcomes, including a focus on the mechanisms that link its different power-sharing provisions to specific outcomes, we can develop a fundamentally deeper understanding of power-sharing.