Law Commons^™

Deliberative Democracy In Severely Fractured Societies, Adeno Addis

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The world is full of boundaries. Whatever their nature, boundaries provide the conditions for communal or individual identity and agency, and they make collective action possible. That very capacity to define and contain, however, allows boundaries to "close off possibilities of being that might otherwise flourish." Paradoxically, boundaries "both foster and inhibit freedom." This article explores how one particular boundary-ethnicity- has served both as an important source of identity and a cause of deep fracture in societies that this article calls "severely fractured." The purpose of the article is to explore what institutional structures and processes might be appropriate to …