Talks
In the crosshairs of great powers? Linkage, leverage and protracted transitions in weak states
Taking as our starting point Levitsky and Way’s analysis of how linkage and leverage have accounted for the success or failure of transitions to democracy in different regions of the world, my colleagues Nino Kemoklidze, Tetiana Malyarenko, and I consider recent... read moreCentrifugal powers – implications for Ukraine
Drawing on recent research on power sharing and territorial self-governance, this paper focuses on the options available for dealing with the territorial contestation between Kiev and the separatists in the two eastern regions of Ukraine. I first review relevant findings from three different sets of data and then outline their implications for moving towards a sustainable arrangement for relations between Kiev and Donetsk and Luhansk.
read morePower Sharing and Transitional Justice
This paper develops a theoretical model to enable a better understanding of the relationship between power sharing and transitional justice in peace agreements and their impact on the attainability and sustainability of long-term peace, justice, and democracy and tests it on a new dataset of 72 post-1989 peace agreements.
read moreSelf-determination and Grand Strategy
At the 20th Liechtenstein Colloquium on International Security, I contributed a talk on the new quality of complexity that shapes the environment today in which self-determination claims are negotiated, and this is likely to increase further in the future.
read moreOne man and his dog? Designing and managing peace processes
This talk offers an overview of the different options that can be used to design negotiation processes and then focuses on some of the likely problems that mediators might encounter along the way and how they can deal with them constructively and swiftly.
read moreSpecial Status: Can the Moldovan-Transnistrian Conundrum be Resolved by Consociational Democracy?
This paper, co-authored with Karl Cordell, starts with a brief overview of the background to the Transnistrian conflict and its management to date. This is followed by a discussion of what the dimensions of special status would need to be given our assessment of the... read moreProcess options and strategies in conflict settlement negotiations
This paper offers an overview of the different options that can be used to design negotiation processes in relation to process design and the role of mediators, purpose, format, participation, agenda, timetable, and the methods for reaching consensus. The second part... read moreTwentieth Anniversary Conference of the OSCE HCNM
Given the persistence of minority-majority tensions and conflict across the OSCE area and beyond, the institution of the HCNM, in my view, remains as highly relevant today as twenty years ago and there are three specific areas in which it has a future role to play: monitoring, preventive quiet diplomacy, and policy transfer.
read moreIntegration and Conflict Prevention in Diverse Societies
One of the fundamental ideas underlying the notion of conflict prevention in diverse societies is that different population segments can resolve any differences by recourse to institutional processes rather than violence. For such institutional processes to be effective, a viable and resilient state is required whose fundamental constitutional principles are broadly accepted and respected across all segments of societies.
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