Deliberative Peace Referendums

Abstract

‘Peace referendums’, which seek to manage armed conflict, are increasingly common around the world. Yet such referendums remain erratic forces—liable as often to aggravate as to resolve tensions. In this book we consider when, despite their risks, referendums can play useful roles amid conflict. We argue that this largely depends on a referendum’s design, including how well it incorporates contemporary lessons from the theory and practice of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy seeks to channel disagreement into reasoned forms of decision-making—for instance, by identifying certain ‘public’ values around which disparate groups may find a measure of common ground. As yet, however, few deliberative democracy scholars have advanced arguments for referendums in conflict societies. This is unsurprising: while designing a referendum to be deliberative is a challenge even in the most peaceable of societies, in a conflict society it is harder still. Nevertheless, discounting deliberative institutional schemes because deliberation appears too difficult, and a society too conflictual, overlooks the possibility that some armed conflict can be traced to scarce opportunities to deliberate in the first place. Using a distinctive combination of deliberative democratic and constitutional theory, and also drawing from the field of conflict studies, we develop what we call the Deliberative Peace Referendum—a referendum held under conditions of conflict and designed to be deliberative. This kind of referendum has two broad objectives: to assist a peace settlement to be achieved, and to secure the settlement’s long-term resilience. After scaffolding a tenuous agreement, the referendum may help to concretize an agreement as a durable constitutional settlement by drawing on deliberative democracy’s perceived legitimacy. A Deliberative Peace Referendum thus takes aim at the standard pathologies of referendums—pathologies that must be addressed if referendums are to avoid repeating the problems of peace referendums in the past. Our purpose with this book is to rescue peace referendums from their habitual under-theorization and poor design, and to rehabilitate them as genuine tools of conflict management.