Settling Self-Determination Disputes: Complex Power-Sharing in Theory and Practice

The study is the result of an international collaborative project supported and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. This multi-year venture has involved a research team of some forty chapter authors and commentators. The research has been accompanied by three major workshops on project methodology, initial chapter reviews and final discussions. A point was made of including both scholars and practitioners involved in power-sharing settlements in the review process, in the hope that more would be learned about the actual implementation of the settlements under investigation. The project team was united in its wish to explore whether long-standing secessionist conflicts have been addressed effectively through the significant number of self-determination settlements that were generated in response to the wave of internal conflicts of the 1990s. It was also committed to testing whether consociationalist and integrative techniques of conflict settlement really are as mutually exclusive as is sometimes supposed, or whether they can in fact be mutually reinforcing. Finally, the project derives its impetus from the necessity to critically rethink the doctrine of self-determination. One may question whether its traditional, restrictive interpretation will be adequate in confronting the wide variety of future challenges to the territorial integrity of states.

Dr Marc Weller is the Director of the European Centre for Minority Issues, in Flensburg, Germany. He is also a Reader in international law at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law and Hughes Hall. He is the Director of the Carnegie Project on Resolving Self-Determination Disputes through Complex Power-sharing and of the Cambridge Rockefeller Project on Restoring an International Consensus of the Rules Governing the Use of Force.
Dr Barbara Metzger is an Associate at the Centre of International Studies in Cambridge. From 2001 to 2005 she was a Senior Researcher with the Cambridge Carnegie Project on Complex Power-Sharing and Self-determination Disputes and has lectured at the University of Cambridge on human rights history, law and institutions in the international arena.