CONSOCIATIONALISM AND POWER SHARING IN AFRICA: RWANDA, BURUNDI, AND THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

Although there are obvious merits to the consociational argument, including the need to recognize the claims of minorities through power-sharing arrangements, translating theory into practice has generally failed in much of Africa. The reasons for this are many and are by no means reducible to single-factor explanations. Looking at the recent experiments in power sharing in former Belgian Africa, this article offers a comparative assessment of the radically different trajectories followed by Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in their efforts to regulate conflict through consociational formulas. Although Rwanda stands as a textbook example of failed power sharing, and the DRC as a less than successful experiment, Burundi, which comes nearest to institutionalizing the Lijphart model, offers grounds for cautious optimism about the merits of a consociational polity. On the strength of the evidence from Burundi, one might conceivably argue that the key to success lies in the extent to which the technicalities of power sharing tend to approximate the conditions spelled out by Lijphart, notably group autonomy, proportionality, and the minority veto. Closer scrutiny of the cases at hand suggests a somewhat different conclusion. Perhaps even more importantly than the mechanics of power sharing, the socio-political context is what spells the difference between success and failure. SINCE ITS FORMULATION BY AREND LIJPHART IN THE 1970s, few theories have had a more enduring impact on the thinking of analysts and practitioners of democratic governance than the consociational model.' Its underlying Rend Lemarchand (renelemar@aol.com) is professor emeritus of Political Science at the University of Florida. He has written extensively on the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. This article is a much revised version of a paper presented in February 2006 at a conference on 'Managing ethno-political conflicts in Africa' jointly organized by the Solomon Ash Center for the Study of Ethno-Political Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. The author wishes to thank the participants in the conference, notably, Brendan O'Leary, and the joint editors of this journal for their searching comments when the article was still in draft form. 1. Arendt Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A comparative exploration (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1977), and for a more succinct formulation, 'The power-sharing approach', in Joseph V. Montville (ed.), Conflict and Peace-Making in Multiethnic Societies (D.C. Heath, Lexington, KY, 1990), pp. 491-509.