Mitigating MENA communitarian conflicts through power-sharing options

Description

The erosion of Arab nation states is attributed to an embedded legitimacy deficit and the deconstruction of geographic barriers. The latest proliferation of cross-national communal conflicts along sectarian, ethnic, and tribal lines expresses the clear intentions of communities to reconstruct the state and renegotiate new terms of the social contract. The politics of communitarian existentialism and collective mobilisations characterise contemporary contention, which calls for communitarian solutions to intercommunitarian problems. A communitocracy is proposed as a viable conflict-mitigating arrangement that assures communitarian powersharing based on the politics of consensus.

Imad Salamey is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University. His books The Decline of Nation-States after the Arab Spring: the Rise of Communitocracy (Routledge, 2017) and Post-Conflict PowerSharing Agreements: Options for Syria (Palgrave, 2018) survey the root causes of rising ethnic and sectarian polarisation and post-conflict peace building options in the MENA countries. Salamey serves as a policy consultant and advisor for various international and regional organisations.