The Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar for this year has concluded. We would like to thank all of you who attended and participated. Your contributions made the series an excellent success, and we hope that you will continue to be involved in the upcoming events of the Penn Program in Ethnic Conflict.

This Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar focuses on power-sharing as a political formula to calm deeply divided places, i.e. countries wracked by national, ethnic and communal conflict. Power-sharing is a standard prescription for protracted conflicts in deeply divided territories, especially when there are antagonistic self-determination claims. But no sensible advocate of power-sharing assumes it is a universally appropriate panacea. Commending power-sharing has to be feasible as well as desirable. We will ask “what are the possible forms of power-sharing that are compatible with democratic and humane pluralist values”? And we shall address what makes power-sharing work. Do power-sharing systems require certain psychological, cultural, sociological pre-requisites, or historical antecedents? We will consider what makes power-sharing systems likely to fail, or what makes them redundant, and consider their pathologies as well as their virtues.