This chapter begins by surveying the current literature on constitutional design constitutions for divided societies and constitutional approaches to power sharing. It pays particular attention to the view that constitutions are best understood not as contracts, but rather as coordination devices. An implication of this view for constitutional design is that, in deeply divided societies, successful coordination (and thus successful constitution-writing) may be easier to achieve if the constitution deliberately leaves certain divisive constitutional questions unresolved, with the understanding that those questions will be resolved incrementally over time. Against this theoretical background, the chapter uses the history and constitutional history of Afghanistan to illuminate the challenges of developing a constitution that can coordinate politics in a deeply divided society, and it evaluates the pros and cons of different approaches to constitutional design in such contexts.

In Israel, police integration is limited mainly by the supply of Arab citizens who wish to join the police. Many Arab Israelis express skepticism that participation in the criminal justice system will improve services, worrying that Arab officers will instead be used as collaborators in anti-Arab repression. Consequently, interviews with police officers paint a picture of an institution that wishes to provide better services to minorities but struggles to do so due to a lack of citizen buy-in. I explore detailed station-level data covering a six-year period on police officers’ religious identities, and I uncover processes through which the police assign officers from different groups to different locations through interviews with high-ranking police officers.

Given the advantages of police integration, why do leaders not integrate the police in every divided society? I first explore the possibility that dominant-group civilians oppose integration, for example out of concern for a loss of jobs or fear that newly-integrated minorities will renew hostilities once integrated. Instead, I find that an overwhelming majority of Iraqi Shias and Israeli Jews support police integration. On the other hand, politicians and community leaders often oppose police integration for personal gain. Iraq, local politicians resist sectarian integration for fear that it will limit their opportunities to distribute jobs in the police as patronage in return for political support. In Israel, Arab community leaders who seek to create an independent Palestinian state view participation in the police as a dangerous normalization of the status quo. To discourage Arabs from joining the police, they portray participation in the police as collaboration with the enemy. Thus, implementation of police integration tends to be limited not by mass-opposition but by instrumental political concerns of political elites.

In Israel, the relationship between Arab citizens and the police centers on a desire for better service provision. This chapter asks how police integration affects the quality and distribution of crime prevention. First, I use original survey data to show that Arab citizens who perceive the police as more integrated are more willing to report crimes to the police. Next, I argue that the police use this information to allocate crime-fighting resources more efficiently. Using panel data on officer demographics and a nationwide crime victimization survey, I show that within a given location, increases in the religious diversity of officers are associated with decreases in crime. This effect occurs only in localities with majority non-Jewish populations. However, within those localities, the decrease in crime holds for both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. These results point to the potential for police integration to benefit all members of society, making it a powerful first-step toward reconciliation in communities with deep-seated identity divisions.

This chapter begins with an overview of police integration worldwide. Nearly 40 percent of modern peace agreements include police reforms, and the makeup of the police rank and file is often central to these reforms. Yet, despite the police’s central role in peace-building, existing literature on power sharing pays little attention to this critical institution. I argue that in divided societies, the police rank-and-file’s unique combination of three characteristics – visibility, discretion, and capacity for violence – makes it especially influential in shaping citizen–state relations. The second half of the chapter details causal mechanisms linking police integration with citizens’ attitudes and expectations. For example, language differences between officers and citizens may make citizens feel less comfortable communicating with officers, or citizens may fear that cultural differences will prevent officers from understanding their situation. When the police are integrated at the patrol-level, officers can monitor their colleagues’ treatment of coethnic citizens and deter bad behavior.

The police are a critical but understudied institution in divided societies. I argue that integrating marginalized groups into the police improves citizens’ attitudes toward the state, not just in terms of their experiences today but also their expectations of the future. Integrating the police signals the government’s commitment to included groups’ security. The signal is critical because police departments are difficult to purge. Once integration is implemented, it is difficult for the state to undo. I propose that the difficulty of purging the police, and consequently the credibility of the government’s signal to an included group, depends not just on how many officers come from each group but also how those officers are distributed. This chapter also introduces the two main cases for analysis, Iraq and Israel, and summarizes the main findings.

Although democratisation can be a vital component of peace settlements, formulaic applications of supposed international norms of democratic governance are potentially counterproductive. Each conflict situation is different; many situations do not admit of prefabricated solutions that one can justly expect all reasonable contestants to accept, either at the outset or as events develop. Procedural standards associated with the ‘democratic entitlement’ obscure the underlying purposes that democratic forms, to be meaningful, need to fulfil. Post-conflict conditions, typically marked by sharp social divisions and a lack of agreement on the political community’s basic premises, are precisely the conditions in which it cannot be taken for granted that standard procedural norms will work to produce democratic social realities. Improvisation is thus essential. Peace and democracy may both be better served if the international lawyers stand aside.

This chapter assesses the evolving literature on power sharing in the context of deeply divided societies. We note that the earliest studies of power sharing understood these mechanisms as a means of fostering democracy under difficult circumstances. Power sharing was typically thought to be the best hope for preventing fragile democracies, often divided along ethnic lines, from spiraling toward violence, dictatorship, or both. Paradoxically, more recent studies now take these same power-sharing institutions to task for being insufficiently democratic, with the most frequently heard complaint being that these institutions provide a means to block the majority’s will. While acknowledging these concerns, we argue that power sharing remains the most viable means by which a limited form of democracy can be secured in states emerging from conflict. We further consider the literature on the relationship between anocracies and conflict, suggesting that power-sharing settlements are unlikely to foster the creation of regimes that are particularly prone either to internal or external wars.