One of the main challenges of peacebuilding after internal conflict is dealing with the collective identities that were positioned vis-à-vis one another during violent conflict. In liberal peacebuilding democratization is often seen as the most important mechanism to achieve peaceful coexistence of conflicting group identities and, concurrently, a lasting peace. As consociational power-sharing has gained prominent position within liberal peacebuilding, two main approaches towards democratic pluralism can be discerned in peacebuilding: integration, in line with the liberal aspirations of peacebuilding, and consociational accommodation. Accommodation is often associated with essentialist or even primordial conceptions of group identities, whereas integrationists want to emphasize their fluid and malleable character. Liberal democracy is often argued to be unable to deal with the grave oppositions in post-conflict societies, while consociationalism is thought to entrench war-time collective identities in illiberal ways.
This paper aims to offer a new perspective on perceptions of collective identities in peacebuilding through a discussion of the debate between liberalism and consociationalism. The attention is shifted from the nature of collective identities as either fluid or primordial towards definitions that, regardless of whether they are primordial or fluid, include or exclude certain collective identities from political processes. From this perspective it will become clear that instead of being antagonistic positions, liberalism and consociationalism share an understanding of the role of comprehensive doctrines and collective identities in political processes that is premised upon secular, dualist assumptions concerning comprehensive doctrines and that allows some into the public sphere, while considering the privatization of others both possible and necessary. A discussion of the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina will serve to show how critiques of secular exclusiveness that are most commonly directed at liberalism also apply to a classical example of consociational democracy.
The secular understanding of collective identities that underpins peacebuilding privileges some identities while it subordinates others, and thereby impedes the formulation of more inclusive approaches to peacebuilding. I will discuss the problems of an exclusionary approach to democracy for the transformation of war-time identities and the development of alternatives and briefly explore ways of formulating a more inclusive alternative understanding. The paper thus contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between two important approaches of dealing with group identities in peacebuilding, and to the development of a more inclusive approach to peacebuilding.
