Institutions are important in mitigating the extent to which shocks produce violent consequences, but their effectiveness is conditioned by the behavior of local and international leaders. Ostensibly perfect institutions may fail due to poor stewardship, while even imperfect ones can succeed at preventing violent escalation if local and international political leaders have sufficient political will.
Territorial Self-governance
Self-determination after Kosovo
Co–edited with Annemarie Peen Rodt, this special issue was published by Europe-Asia Studies. It presents the results...
Self-Determination After Kosovo
Using Kosovo as an illustrative case study, this article discusses the meaning of self-determination in its historical and contemporary contexts and examines the different options available for the accommodation of contested self-determination claims.
The Merits and Perils of Territorial Accommodation
Published in Political Studies Review in 2011, this review essay discusses three volumes on territorial accommodation as a conflict settlement strategy: Brancati, D. (2009) Peace by Design: Managing Intrastate Conflict through Decentralization. Oxford: Oxford...
The Emerging Practice of Complex Power Sharing
Examining three main schools of conflict resolution -- centripetalism, consociational power sharing and power dividing -- and contrasting their analysis and recommendations with current policy to resolve self-determination, this chapter argues that there is an...
Managing ethno-national conflict: towards an analytical framework
Published in 2011, this article argues that the management of ethno-national conflict remains an important issue on the security agendas of states and international organisations alike, from the Western Balkans to the Middle East and Asia Pacific, from sub-Saharan...
Governing (in) Kirkuk
Focusing on the dynamics of the process of settling the status of Kirkuk, principally within the framework of the current Iraqi constitution of 2005 and the 2009 proposals of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, this article and takes into consideration the...
Idiosyncrasy or Foresight: Pre-1990 Cases of Territorial Autonomy in Europe
Published in Asymmetric Autonomy and the Settlement of Ethnic Conflicts (ed. by Marc Weller and Katherine Nobbs, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), this chapter argues that while territorial autonomy is not automatically linked to forms of democratic governance,...
Building Democratic States after Conflict: Institutional Design Revisited
Few debates have engulfed the literatures of comparative politics and international relations for as long and as intensively as that between advocates of different schools of thought on how to build stable and democratic polities in divided societies. Especially when...