About the Book

Constitution-making for democracy has always been a highly political and contested process. It has never been more ambitious, or more difficult, than today as politicians and experts attempt to build democratic institutions that will foster peace and stability in countries torn by violent conflict. The extended investigation out of which this book has grown has ranged across three continents. It has examined such apparently intractable cases as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sri Lanka and Fiji, as well as apparent ‘success stories‘ like South Africa, Ghana and Uganda.

Three groups of questions are explored:

* How and by whom were democratic institutions (re)designed?

* How have they functioned in practice: what has been the relationship between democratic institutions and democratic politics?

* How have they measured up to the pressures placed on them by ongoing violence, poverty, globalization and democratization itself?

The authors, while regarding democracy as a general entitlement, refuse to subscribe to a triumphalist view which sees it as a universal panacea. Instead they seek to understand how democratic institutions actually facilitate (or sometimes fail to facilitate) improved governance and the management of conflict in a variety of national settings.

This thoughtful and empirical set of explorations is highly relevant to other societies wrestling with similar problems of institutional design in situations of democratic transition and/or deep-seated social conflict.

Commendations

"There are no single unequivocal answers to the question this volume addresses.Yet these highly informed original contributions on the politics of institutional design offer a wealth of insights into the kind of processes that have led to recent successes and failures on the democratization front." - Martin Doornbos, Institute of Social Studies, the Hague

The title of this book neatly encapsulates its central question...It is really to the authors' credit, and to DfID's, that there is no attempt to avoid uncomfortable findings, let alone to base further simple prescriptions upon them. the book reinforces a message that cannot be repeated too often, it seems, which is the need to relate institutions and institutional innovation to its specific political context.' - Vicky Randall, University of Essex

Contents

Contents
Introduction: Can Democracy be Designed? - Sunil Bastian and Robin Luckham
1. Democratic Institutions and Democratic Politics and Political Violence - Robin Luckham, Anne Marie Goetz and Mary Kaldor
2. The Politics of Institutional Design in the South African Transition - David Pottie and Shireen Hassim
3. The Reformulation of Ugandan Democracy - James Katalikawe and Aaron Griffiths
4. Ghana: The Political Economy of ‘Successful‘ Ethno-Regional Conflict Management - E. Gyimah-Boadi
5. The Politics of Institutional Design: An Overview of the Case of Sri Lanka - Radhika Coomaraswamy
6. Proportional Representation, Political Violence and the Participation of Women in the Political Process in Sri Lanka - Kishali Pinto Jayawardena
7. The Political Economy of Electoral Reform: Proportional Representation in Sri Lanka -Sunil Bastian
8. Electoral Engineering and the Politicization of Ethnic Frictions in Fiji - Jon Fraenkel
9. Building Democracy from the Outside: The Dayton Agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina - Marcus Fox
10. Managing Ethnic Conflicts: Democratic Decentralization in Bosnia-Hercegovina- Vesna Bojicic
11. Conclusion: The Politics of Institutional Choice - Sunil Bastian and Robin Luckham

About the Author

Edited by Sunil Bastian and Robin Luckham

Dr Sunil Bastian is Director of International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo. A political economist, he was originally interested in labour issues, especially in Sri Lanka's plantation sector. More recently, he has concentrated his work on the conflict in the country and efforts to reform the state. He is a founding member of the Social Scientists Association.

Dr Robin Luckham was Research Associate at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, following early retirement. He has held positions in universities in West Africa, the USA and Australia, as well as the UK. For many years he has researched and written on the military and politics, on disarmament and development and on democratization, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. For the past three years he has co-directed a major DFID-funded research programme on Democratic Governance in Conflict-torn Societies, from which this book originates.

He has written or edited six books, including The Nigerian Military: A Sociological Analysis of Authority and Revolt 1960-67 (Cambridge University Press, 1971) and, with Gordon White, Democratization in the South: The Jagged Wave (Manchester University Press, 1996)