Following on from a Workshop co-ordinated by Mitchell Institute Fellow Professor John Nagle, hosted at the Mitchell Institute in 2025, a special edition of Ethnopolitics has been published which challenges elite-centred accounts of power-sharing that focus only on parties and political leaders.  Contributions show how protest and social movement activism systematically shape whether settlements are stabilised and repaired, stretched and partially democratised, or unsettled and thrown into crisis.  Case studies include Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Kuwait and Bahrain.

The Introduction to the Special Edition outlines an agenda for research on protest and power-sharing.  Power-sharing scholarship has ignored grassroots contentious politics, viewing protest as a threat to the top-down model of consociationalism.  Protest is thus seen as a destabilizing force, narrowing the ground needed for power-sharing elites to engage in moderative behaviour required for peace.  The article argues that citizen-led protest represents a broad spectrum of approaches to power-sharing, ranging from support to outright opposition.  In this way, rather than simply a subverting type of politics, protest is a major arena for struggles for democracy in power sharing systems.

Read the Introduction here.

Professor John Nagle

John Nagle is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published several books and over 50 journal articles.  His research focuses on social movements and divided societies, sexuality, and power-sharing.