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This presentation concerns remedies that have been recommended for polities with severe ethnic divisions. The lecture will first depict the characteristics of severely divided societies and the problems for democracy posed by ethnic polarization. It will then describe the principal academic prescriptions for these problems, before turning to an enigma: the paucity of countries that have actually adopted the institutions commonly recommended to cabin serious ethnic conflict. Adoptions are relatively few, and when they occur are not generally durable. The inability to adopt durable institutions of ethnic power sharing is a major unsolved problem of democratization. Although this problem is present in several regions of the world, special attention will be devoted to its manifestations in Asia.
Bio: Donald L. Horowitz is the James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science Emeritus at Duke University. He holds law degrees from Syracuse and Harvard and a PhD in political science from Harvard. Professor Horowitz is the author of eight books, including A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (1991), which won the Ralph Bunche Prize of the American Political Science Association, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (2001), and Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia, published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He recently completed a book project, provisionally titled Constitutional Processes and Democratic Commitment.
Co-hosted by: The Centre for Southeast Asia Research at the Institute of Asian Research and the Department of Political Science, UBC
