From Belfast to Bosnia: Piecemeal Peacemaking and the Role of Institutional Learning

Implementing power-sharing arrangements can be cumbersome. This article examines the institutional processes and changing nature of power-sharing mechanisms instituted in Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It scrutinises the problems of legitimacy and elite predominance, endorsing power-sharing arrangements and their institutional processes. The institutional capacity of consociational arrangements and the strengths and weaknesses of consociational theory are addressed. Finally, the power-sharing panacea is then applied to the Bosnian case, in the guise of the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995, and the Northern Irish Good Friday Agreement of 1998. These cases illustrate the degree to which piecemeal or incremental consociational arrangements exhibit degrees of institutional learning over time.