Ethnopolitical conflicts² have been high up on the international security agenda. The international community has dedicated much attention and effort to building peace in societies torn by ethnopolitical violence as well as to preventing the outbreak of violence in conflict-prone divided societies in the first place. A minority of authors have claimed that ethnopolitical violence is inevitable as ethnicity is primordial and inherently conflict-prone (Kaplan 1993). However, such a fatalist position can hardly explain why so many ethnically plural societies have not experienced violence and why those divided societies that slid into civil war often had long periods of peaceful...

Elections serve multiple purposes. Most importantly, free and fair elections are an indispensible element in any modern democracy. Not surprisingly, therefore, elections have mostly been studied by scholars of democracy and democratization.⁵ Scholars of conflict studies, however, are less interested in the democratic merits of elections per se but rather in the effects elections have on civil peace and political violence, in particular in inter-ethnic relations. In this report, we assume the conflict studies perspective. We are less interested in the quality of democracy, but rather in the effects of elections on the prospect of peaceful inter-ethnic relations.

A number...

The last two decades violence in the Sudan region has, more or less prominently, featured in the news. The conflict in Darfur is tragically still ongoing, whereas the civil war between the North and South officially came to an end with the signing of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Tensions between Sudan and South Sudan still exist, however, as is exemplified in the ongoing disputes about oil transportation and alleged support to rebel groups on Sudanese territory by the South Sudanese government. In contrast to the atrocities committed in both conflicts, as well as the difficult relation between Sudan and...

The debate about timing and sequencing of elections has emerged from the broader discussion about peacebuilding.¹⁷ As a consequence, the debate has focused on societies with a recent history of ethnopolitical civil war that has often been brought to an end by a peace agreement proscribing elections. However, issues of timing and sequencing also arise when there is no tradition of regular free elections and questions of electoral engineering come to the fore. In the case of South Sudan the reference point for timing and sequencing is the country’s independence, which is the end point of the roadmap created by...

Elections, wherever in the world they are conducted, pose an enormous challenge to the administrative body mandated with their organization. To a large extent this challenge is technical in the sense that it requires administrative skills and resources to meet them. In conflict-prone divided societies, however, the challenge is often compounded because many technicalities are highly politicized.

The electoral management body (EMB) is the institution primarily responsible for administering the elections. Its core activities are (1) determining who is eligible to vote, (2) receiving and validating the nominations of the participating parties and candidates, (3) conducting the polling, (4) counting...

Of the three features of electoral design that are discussed in this report the electoral system has the most far-reaching consequences. Whereas the timing of an election and the set-up of the electoral management body impact on the likelihood that election success is undermined by violence, the electoral system also has long-term effects on politics. As Arend Lijphart points out, “if one wants to change the nature of a particular democracy, the electoral system is likely to be the most suitable and effective instrument for doing so” (1995: 412). The electoral system sets the rules by which candidates are elected...

In conflict-prone divided societies, elections carry the risk of triggering ethnic violence because of their competitive and polarizing nature. Given the intrinsic and instrumental merits of democracy, however, avoiding elections is no serious alternative. Rather, the challenge is to design elections in a way that minimizes the risk of violence.

In this report we have discussed three key features of electoral engineering: timing and sequencing; electoral administration; and electoral system design. The lessons learned from the growing number of elections in conflict-prone divided societies seem clearest with a view to timing and electoral administration. Scholars with different theoretical and methodological...