Consociationalism is Dead! Long Live Zombie Power‐Sharing!

Abstract

Scholars argue that consociationalism has become the preferred institutional tool of choice for the international community when seeking an end to civil war. This paper argues that consociationalism is increasingly becoming redundant as an institutional apparatus to end violent conflict linked to intra-state conflict. Over the last few decades divided societies have been subjected to consociational influence. In many places consociational institutions have long since ceased functioning in a way that is healthy for the body politic, yet somehow consociationalism remains dominant both for policy prescription and in academic thinking. While consociationalism was once understood by institutional designers to be transformative, facilitating a transition to a less sectarian system, the reverse is true. Rather than transformation and change, consociations tend to develop ossified properties rendering them resistant to practically any reform. Summoning the image of the zombie, I note that consociationalism is 'dead but dominant' and has to defend itself through increasingly authoritarian statecraft. Consociationalism is thus neither dead nor alive, but walking dead, listlessly stumbling from one crisis to the next. Each crisis is experienced contingently with the feeling that something could happenthat something could changevery soon, even as routine prevails in the face of an increasingly defensive state.

Consociational Power‐Sharing in the Arab World as Counter‐Revolution

“…Postwar neoliberal and reconstruction policies serve the same objectives (Baumann 2016; Leenders 2012; Salloukh 2019a). The result is what John Nagle (2020) labels in his contribution to this special feature as the ‘zombification of power‐sharing’, in which power‐sharing leads to state stagnation, while still managing to perpetuate itself through clientelist loyalties. Toby Dodge (2020) tells a similar story in his piece on Iraq’s informal consociationalism, where the ‘ muhasasa ’ system represents the political economy of cartels.…”

“…To overcome this, Nagle (2020) proposes in this special feature a more serious consideration of the many forms of inequality that engender and bind together state‐society relations. Indeed, both Lebanon and Iraq are currently witnessing revolutionary attempts – albeit so far ineffective – to de‐normalize sectarian othering, gender inequality, and economic exclusion.…”

Understanding Power‐Sharing Performance: A Lifecycle Approach

“…Choices made at the point of adoption and during the life of the agreement will also tell us something about its ‘endability’. By this, we mean whether it leads to collapse and renewed violence, to protracted dysfunctionality (or what John Nagle [2020] labels ‘zombie power‐sharing’ in this special feature), or to a viable form of peaceful and democratic governance. We examine three stages in the power‐sharing lifecycle: adoption, implementation, and (possible) end.…”

Power‐Sharing in Deeply Divided Societies: Consociationalism and Sectarian Authoritarianism

“…The protests taking place in Lebanon and Iraq in 2019 and 2020 are protests against what Toby Dodge has appropriately called ‘sectarian authoritarianism’ (Dodge 2012). Yet the ‘New Generation’ of consociationalists, including Allison McCulloch and John Nagle, claim to support the revolutionary struggle against the sectarian ruling elites of Lebanon and Iraq (McCulloch 2014; but contrast Nagle and Clancy 2012 with Nagle 2020 in this issue and the critique of Nagle and Clancy in Dixon 2011). This is puzzling, because it is consociationalism’s radical critics, the ‘Cosmopolitans’ (or ‘Transformationalists’), who have opposed consociationalism precisely because of its justification of sectarian authoritarianism and disdain for non‐sectarianism and popular struggles (Dixon 1997; Taylor 2009; see Halawi 2020 in this issue).…”