This chapter marks the starting point of our investigation of actual policy solutions to tackle armed conflict. When a doctor has reached her diagnosis, she must then decide on the right medication to administer. Similarly, while economists started by studying the drivers of political violence, in recent years increasing efforts have been made to understand how to cut the Gordian knot of conflict. As argued in this chapter, a first-order factor is the institutional environment, and in particular the need to give a voice to all citizens and groups in society. Democracy is desirable, but without proper safeguards it can have a dark side and result in blood being spilt. Furthermore, the type of democracy and the provisions of sharing power between groups matter. Closer inspection of local-level power-sharing in Northern Ireland, the building of modern Switzerland after its civil war in 1847, the difficulties for current democratization in Iraq and the franchise extension during the British Age of Reform drive this discussion forward.

The concluding chapter wraps up the various arguments and pieces of evidence presented in this book in favor of our peace formula. Overall, the first take-home message to be highlighted is the need for smart idealism – as neither the cold-hearted egotist nor the naïve idealist will be able to curb conflict. Secondly, it is again stressed which concrete policies are key to making a difference, creating a synthesis of the various points of the previous chapters. In particular, we emphasize the key role of a democratic voice, security warranties, promoting productive work, fostering trust and reconciliation, accelerating a well-managed green energy transition and stepping up international coordination across a variety of issues. The final point is that since we are all affected by conflict, we should all be part of the solution. It turns out that several studies have found that pressure from the public opinion matters, both in the implementation of policies and in preventing atrocities. There is a job to be done, so let us work together to make a change.

This chapter starts off by explaining that we are in the midst of a critical historical juncture with a record number of wars and conflicts around the world, calling for urgent action. Next, we discuss in depth three common but disastrous misconceptions, namely that shady deals leaving autocrats in power can bring peace, that “buying” peace through simple cash transfers works, and that charm offensives and communication efforts suffice to do the job. Drawing on a number of examples, the book highlights the pitfalls of these common misconceptions before turning to success stories. Illustrated by examples of the successful postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan, the fall of apartheid in South Africa and democratization of Uruguay, Chile and Peru, the chapter then formulates the key components of what is called the peace formula – a set of key policies that constitute crucial ingredients for a successful and lasting pacification process. Finally, it is stressed that to counter distorted incentives for peace we need smart idealism – pairing good intentions with evidence-based policy knowledge.

The advantages of power-sharing arrangements as a tool of peacemaking are gradually being substantiated in practice and research, but have not yet gained normative legitimacy, nor have they been properly incorporated into either the human rights framework or international and regional law. When power-sharing arrangements utilize predefined ethno-national groups as a central feature of the constitutional structure, they are widely seen as illiberal (and unjust) and as violating individual rights to equality and nondiscrimination. This conflict between power-sharing and human rights is generally viewed as a dilemma between peace and justice, and the main justification given to support the maintenance of the arrangements is that they are an indispensable political compromise to overcome violent conflict and are preferable to the continuation of bloodshed. However, this justification is not always enough, as the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitution illustrates. But is this “peace versus justice” framing of the tensions between power-sharing and human rights accurate? Does it properly account for the meaning and requirements of justice in loci of deeply divided places?

Peacemaking practice shows that national minorities are aware of the shortcomings of liberal democracy and human rights to secure their fundamental interests, and when they come to the negotiating table their focal points are not bills of rights, but rather inclusive political institutions. This political inclusivity often involves the use of power-sharing democracy, a political framework that intentionally accommodates competing ethno-national groups within the state’s governing structures. Many experts, nongovernmental organizations, scholars, and policymakers have also recommended power-sharing as the more adequate institutional design for such places. This chapter evaluates democratic power-sharing vis-è-vis the more common model of majoritarian democracy to support the argument that a revision of our taken-for-granted assumptions about what “proper” democracy looks like is needed. To illustrate the general observations, the chapter reviews the use of power-sharing systems in Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Northern Ireland.

A central criticism of power-sharing arrangements, and especially of their ethnic-corporate versions, is that they violate the basic principle of equality and nondiscrimination. The case of Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia & Herzegovina, submitted in 2006 and delivered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 2009, vividly illustrates this problem. In this case, the ECtHR struck down central features of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s power-sharing arrangements on the grounds that they breached the right to nondiscrimination with regard to participation in elections for the legislature and presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. To better understand the legal analysis and normative assumptions underlying this prominent perception of power-sharing arrangements, and to explore its shortcomings that the concept of collective equality aims to address, this chapter presents the ECtHR rulings regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitutional arrangements and the criticisms raised against it. It shows how the legal framing portrays the conflict as another version of the peace versus justice debate, in which human rights obligations represent the demands of justice, while power-sharing arrangements represent the unavoidable, though regrettable (in terms of justice), price of peace. This legal appraisal, the chapter argues, avoids a central and crucial normative feature of the situation – the “elephant in the room” of national self-determination in multinational places.

This chapter examines four cases of collapsed states from the Middle East and North Africa – Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. State collapse was marked by the breakdown of national institutions and the effective loss of a functioning central government. Different governance arrangements appeared across the territory of the country. This chapter discusses the nature of state collapse and its bearing on constitution-making processes and constitutional design. International actors may be drawn in as partisans of different factions or as potential mediators and facilitators of conflict resolution and state reconstruction. Peace-making requires the main factions to accept that the costs of fighting outweigh any benefits and to agree on structured negotiations. Sustainable peace requires agreements on governance, including potentially interim power-sharing, a constitution-making process, transitional security arrangements, and some guiding principles for a reconstructed state. While a federal or devolved governance arrangement may seem logical, the factional elites may prefer power-sharing at the center. If they do opt for a federal or devolved structure, they face vexing issues in defining the constituent units, the allocation of powers, and the nature of central institutions, which may result in an extended period of muddled governance and power politics with no constitutional clarity.

This chapter discusses the place of conflict in transitional justice. Building on a range of historical real-life examples, it argues that conflict is an important rather than incidental part of many, if not all, transitional justice processes. The chapter initially focuses on value conflicts and then turns to conflicts of interests (political power, offices, money, etc.). Drawing on recent realist work in political theory, the chapter argues that it is time to give politics its due and idealisation a rest in transitional justice. This is not an argument against ideals, but against an approach that is idealistic in the wrong sense, in such a way as to suppress, erase from view, real experiences of conflict. Towards the end, the chapter explores recent attempts in the transitional justice literature to take conflict more seriously, particularly Christine Bell’s account of transitional justice as bargaining.

In August of 2000, after the intervention of international mediators, the government of Burundi and seventeen political parties signed the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi with a constitution finally being signed in 2005. Burundi’s iterative cycles of ethnic violence and the underlying mistrust between the minority Tutsi, which controlled the military, and the majority Hutu are the backdrop on which the constitutional process was set. The entire process, based on the Peace of Arusha, was plagued by anxiety and insecurity, and the country to this day has not managed to find stable footing. From the debates over parliamentary apportionment to more recent struggles of the CNDD-FDD party to erase or rewrite the agreements made at Arusha, questions remain over the constitution’s initial intentions as well as its future.

When the constitutional bargain process is non-inclusive and nonparticipatory, and when civil society fails to operate as a democratizing force, the constitutional outcome is not likely to resolve the political and societal ills of authoritarianism. Chapter 6 addressed several of these constitutional design issues. It first examines cases where constitutions failed to limit the arbitrary powers of the monarchs (Morocco and Jordan) or presidents (Egypt and Algeria) by utilizing a constitutional design that lacked textual clarity, adopting contradictory provisions, and creating parallel institutions. Next, the chapter examines “non-consensual” constitutional designs in deeply divided societies. First, in countries where an ethnoreligious minority ruled against the majority’s will (Bahrain and Syria), new constitutions failed to institutionalize power-sharing. Second, where regional cleavages, rivalries, and grievances were prominent issues, as in Yemen and Libya, federalist and region-based power-sharing constitutional arrangements failed to prevent conflict. Lastly, where a country was deeply divided across ideological and identity lines (as was Egypt in 2012), winner-take-all approach to constitutional drafting alienated half of the population, leading to the failure of the constitution and the democratic transitional process.

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.

Nearly all contemporary conflicts are driven in part by political marginalization.This political marginalization amplifies the consequences of economic and cultural marginalization. To craft a durable peace, the parties to peace negotiations often spend considerable time and effort crafting power-sharing arrangements that balance the pull of some parties for greater diffusion and devolution of political power with the pull of other parties to maintain a degree of political centralization, for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness, and to preserve their prior political privileges. This chapter explores the puzzle of whether and how to create a vertical power-sharing arrangement that leads to a durable peace. It reviews the peace processes related to conflicts in Bosnia, Colombia, Indonesia/Aceh, Iraq, Macedonia, Nepal, the Philippines/Mindanao, South Africa, Sudan, and Yemen to understand how parties have grappled with the thorny set of conundrums, including the choice of state structure; the allocation of legislative and executive powers among the levels of government; the degree of political, administrative, and/or fiscal decision-making authority to be devolved; and the timeline for implementing any agreed plan for decentralization.

The chapter examines the afterlife of peace agreements aimed at ending civil wars in the post-Cold War era. Assessing the ‘success’ or otherwise of these agreements is not possible without an appreciation of the context – historical, political, cultural and normative – within which they have been negotiated, concluded and implemented. While context is thus all-important, the history and fate of peace accords have also been shaped by the content of individual agreements, as well as by the manner of their implementation. The record shows that poorly designed and inadequately supported peace agreements can entrench pre-war patterns of conflict, exacerbate intra-elite competition, and accentuate socio-economic and political grievances within war-torn societies. By contrast, agreements that are properly designed, adequately resourced, and underpinned by constructive political support from parties, regional actors and international sponsors, can strengthen the political forces and dynamics favouring long-term stability and societal transformation towards self-sustaining peace. Peace agreements after civil wars are often best approached as living documents whose flexible and politically informed interpretation can help parties and mediators chart political avenues out of protracted violence.

Exploitation of natural resources has become one of the principal means for parties to an armed conflict to finance their armed struggle. In response to this reality, several international approaches have been developed to curtail – what can be referred to as – ‘illegal’ exploitation of natural resources. The current chapter examines how ‘illegality’ is construed in this context and compares this to understandings of illegality within (domestic) peace settlements and the international legal framework for the governance of natural resources. The purpose of this inquiry is to understand how and to what extent international interventions support arrangements for the management of natural resources as set out in peace agreements. The chapter concludes that the international legal framework, international interventions and arrangements in domestic peace settlements are, for the most part, mutually supportive. At the same time, peace settlements tend to take a more expansionist approach of illegality compared to international interventions, including in their definition mismanagement of natural resources or their revenues by governments. Based on these precedents in domestic peace settlements, the chapter argues in favour of recalibrating conceptions of illegality in international approaches.