Power-sharing extended: Policing and education reforms in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Northern Ireland

Power-sharing theory proposes democratic strategies for managing conflict in deeply-divided societies. The power-sharing literature has been dominated by a debate between two models of power-sharing, the consociational model proposed by Arend Lijphart and the integrative or incentives model defended by Donald Horowitz. Both models focus on electoral systems and constitutional design.; Societies exiting from protracted, violent conflict through negotiated peace agreements offer extreme challenges for power-sharing, tests that the theories were not designed to handle. Nascent power-sharing structures are not sufficient to handle such highly polarizing issues as combatant demobilization; refugee return; biased, dysfunctional, and/or criminalized institutions of state administration; and rejectionist elites. In such situations, implementation of power-sharing across institutions of state administration becomes crucial. But legacies from the conflict and state administration make implementation problematic. External actors become necessary for implementation. Neither power-sharing theory includes implementation, external actors, or institutions of state administration.; This study establishes a framework for understanding the dynamics of implementation of power-sharing. Using the cases of policing and education in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, I show how local and external actors contend over power-sharing reforms within a framework created by legacies from the conflict, state administration, and the texts of peace agreements.; My key finding is that external actors can have success in overcoming institutional legacies and local resistance to power-sharing state administrative reforms, but only if they identify change as a priority, allocate resources, and work together, as was the case with policing in Northern Ireland and in the Brcko District in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, this success in state-building comes at a cost; power-sharing theory seeks democratic solutions to governance problems in divided societies, but implementation of state-building only comes with external suspension of local democratic practices. This is the paradox of state-building.