Establishing democracy after a country has been torn apart by ethno-national conflict is a momentous task. If the post-conflict scaffolding for governance is faulty, stability, peace, and freedom hang in the balance. For sure, the fragility of democracy, young or old, cannot be underestimated. There are many questions to which we do not have answers. Yet the success of democracy in post-conflict states, in particular, depends greatly on the answer to one question: Which set of political institutions best promises a democratic government such that a democratic state can grow and persist in the face of ethnic and religious divisions made deep by a history of conflict between them? The executive office is one such institution whose design largely influences which way a state will swing.

Joanne McEvoy explores the design and practice of power-sharing executives in the post-conflict states of Bosnia, Macedonia, and Northern Ireland. The book’s central purpose is two-fold. First, through a rich comparative analysis the author seeks to identify which formulation of rules is most likely to be successful in both passing policy and promoting inter-ethnic cooperation. All three cases employ a consociational form of power-sharing that emphasizes public recognition of multiple group identities over a single, common identity. They each have an element of cross-community power sharing among its major groups and those groups have some autonomy to protect their respective interests. The cases also share the presence of minority vetoes and an element of proportionality in that executive authority in some way reflects divisions within the populace. Yet within this frame of consociation there is much room for variation, as the case studies show. Rules can be more or less formalized, require more or less inclusiveness, or have more or less veto points. Rules may determine the position of groups before elections (corporate consociation) or rather accord positions based on election results (liberal consociation). Second, the author explores the role and consequent effects of external actor involvement (i.e., the U.S. and British governments, the European Union) in the formation and operation of power sharing.

This book consists of an introductory chapter and seven chapters segmented into three case study sections. The introductory chapter provides an excellent definitional framework of post-conflict institutions, background on power-sharing theory and executive formation, and an overview of research design methodology. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore the power-sharing deals of Northern Ireland, the Sunningdale agreement of 1974, and the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998. McEvoy’s research design is notable, because it allows for comparisons like this. Power sharing can be examined not only between cases, but also within the cases themselves. In this way, the author masterfully shows—by contrasting Sunningdale’s power-sharing failure and GFA’s power-sharing success—that inclusiveness, minority guarantees, and the right sort of external government involvement can make all the difference.

In Chapters 5 and 6, readers are introduced to the case of Bosnia and “[its] less than positive experience of power sharing” following its 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) (p. 107). Bosnia’s DPA is different from the Northern Ireland experiences in that external actors heavy handedly imposed peace settlement and reform. Moreover, DPA had more veto points and was clearly a corporate consociational settlement, where positions for “three constituent peoples” were determined prior to elections. Ten years after DPA, the power-sharing executive is mired in inter-party hostility. The author finds fault in part with the EU for failing to incentivize elites to compromise and in part with the restrictive, corporate nature of its rules. Yet two issues weaken this argument. First, the carrot of EU membership worked to incentivize groups in Macedonia (Albanians in particular) to unify and cooperate, as we find in Chapters 7 and 8. Why then was the effectiveness of the EU incentives so limited in the case of Bosnia? Is there more to this story than a shift in the EU role from one of ‘imposing’ to ‘supporting’? Second, there is much variation in the level of violence experienced by local populations prior to the creation of these power-sharing executives under study. For instance, in the case of Northern Ireland the conflict lasted for more than three decades, claiming 3,600 lives. In the case of Macedonia armed conflict lasted only six months in 2001, claiming 130 lives. In Bosnia, the conflict lasted three years, but claimed more than 100,000 lives and displaced more than half of its 4.4 million pre-war population (p. 9). McEvoy argues that “such variation in conflict as the causal explanation of power-sharing is… too simple” (pp. 9–10). She explains that widening the historical timeframe shows that each has a long historical experience with conflict, and this, therefore, renders the immediate experience of conflict on the outcomes of power-sharing executives unpersuasive as an independent variable. One would be hard-pressed, however, to find a country on the continent of Europe that has not experienced punctuated periods of conflict over the past few centuries. Although the author shows quite well how institutional rules and the involvement of external actors are consequential to the success of executive power-sharing, the intensity of conflict and the level of destructiveness experienced by the population whether in lives lost, years fought, or percentage of population displaced, should not be discarded as inconsequential to the stability of post-conflict institutions and/or agreements. The failings of power sharing in Bosnia’s case could in part be explained by the extreme destructiveness of its conflict, which preceded negotiations.

The final case, the case of Macedonia shows “the challenges of managing multiple public identities” right down to the naming of an airport or the language used in history books (pp.192–96). The case centers on the Ohrid Framework Agreement. What is most interesting about Macedonia is the liberal nature of its power sharing in that there are no formal power-sharing requirements concerning executive formation. Here we see how institutional design produced from a “fusion of actor preferences” can take on a life of its own. Compromise and cooperation came more organically rather than by predetermined rules (e.g., Northern Ireland’s method of sequential portfolio allocation or Bosnia’s corporate method of predetermining positions). The author considers Macedonia to be “relatively successful,” largely as a result of these liberal, less formalized structures.

This study is important for a number of reasons. The case studies show the various ways in which external actors apply pressure to various groups to bring about progress. Here we find evidence that incentivizing groups with carrots (side payments provided by the British government in the 1998 Northern Ireland agreement, or promise of EU membership to Macedonia in the early 2000s) rather than sticks (the British government’s use of suspension powers and threat of ending talks in the 1998 Northern Ireland agreement, or the U.S. threat of imposing sanctions in the 1994 Bosnia talks, or the EU’s warnings of isolation and removal of office in post-DPA Bosnia) can be more effective. Furthermore, this book reveals the studied care with which all parties should approach post-conflict negotiations. It is a delicate and complicated matter indeed. Lastly, McEvoy’s Power-Sharing Executives ultimately moves us closer to understanding the types of executive power-sharing structures that are most likely to incentivize inter-ethnic cooperation among elites, so that ethnically divided states can be at peace long enough to mend the deep wounds caused by conflict.