This chapter considers the multiple and changing worldviews of Western Jewry in search of ontological and physical security in a post-enlightenment world of nation-states. Informed by a relational humanism, I interrogate the how different communities facing similar challenges developed different worldviews. The Introduction positions the paper in relationship to the other chapters in the volume, Section I explores the emergence of four different worldviews of western Jews from the beginning of the enlightenment through the early 20th century, and Section II considers the various events and processes that led the world’s two largest Jewish communities, the United States and Israel, to anchor themselves in two different worldviews.

Many scholars have detected a decrease in political violence in recent decades, but the causes of this decline remain unclear. As a contribution to this debate, this chapter revisits the controversy over trends in conflict after the end of the Cold War. While several scholars made ominous predictions of surging ethnic warfare, Ted Robert Gurr presented evidence of a pacifying trend since the mid?1990s and predicted a further decline in ethnic conflict in an article on"ethnic warfare on the wane." Leveraging more recent data on ethnic groups and their participation in ethnic civil wars, this chapter evaluates if Gurr was right about the decline of ethnic conflict, and if he was right for the right reasons. We assess whether an increase in governments' accommodative policies toward ethnic groups can plausibly account for a decline in ethnic civil war. Our findings are largely compatible with Gurr's observations and stand in stark contrast to various pessimistic projections that were made in the early post-Cold War period. Among a number of empirical dimensions, we have found that this relatively optimistic perspective holds up well despite a surge in civil conflict in recent years. Ethnic, as opposed to non-ethnic, civil wars appear to have subsided after the mid-1990s, and this decline is at least partially attributable to an increase in governments' accommodative policies toward ethnic groups, such as the granting of group rights, regional autonomy, and inclusion through governmental power sharing, as well as democratization and peacekeeping.

In this chapter, we explore an actor-centric approach that emphasizes strategic interaction and offers an alternative to IV-estimation to pursue the evaluation of Master Hypothesis 4. We proceed in two steps. First, we introduce a simple formal model that captures the most important strategic dimension and highlights what is crucial for reverse causation: The conditions under which governments are likely to share power depending on the level of threat posed by a domestic challenger. As we have shown in Chapters 3 and 6, previous research on the origins of power sharing highlights either government incentives for the co-optation of threatening challengers through power sharing arrangement or risk-diversion by means of exclusion so as to avoid perilous infighting. Rather than favoring either consideration at the expense of the other, the model presented here unifies these mechanisms and shows that both have their place - depending on the challenger's level of threat as well as the government's ability to provide credible guarantees. In a second step, the chapter provides a novel statistical estimator that closely mirrors the strategic logic of the theoretical model, but also accounts for the selection on unobservables. Applied to data at the level of ethnic groups around the globe since World War II, the model offers strong evidence that governments do indeed strategically use power sharing as a way of managing the risk of conflict. In short, power sharing is systematically endogenous to conflict as suggested by Master Hypothesis 4. Moreover, the results reaffirm that power sharing systematically causes peace, and that naïve analyses that do not account for endogeneity tend to underestimate this effect.

An over-reliance on a simplistic rendering of secularization theory has led many students of International Relations to minimize the role that religion plays in contemporary global politics. A turn to the examination of “worldviews,” however, is a welcome opportunity to remind ourselves of the enduring claim that religion has on how modern individuals and communities continue to understand systems of order, and the relationship between human existence and what is really real. Religion and politics are two foundational aspects of human life and community that relate to each other as mutually constitutive elements of coherent – if often politically problematic – worldviews.

Expressing the predictable and controlled and the unpredictable and uncontrollable as unavoidably linked aspects of human experience in the real world, gardens and forests (or jungles) serve here as metaphors grounded in different fields of human endeavor. Section 10.1 of this chapter explores some of these. Section 10.2 explores the garden of experiments and the forest of experimentation as different ways of operating under conditions of putatively controllable risk and acknowledged uncertainty. Section 10.3 concludes by considering parks as a hybrid of garden and forest, a terrain where Newtonianism and Post-Newtonianism can overlap. It also discusses the role of values in worldviews and discusses science and religion as the two reigning worldviews that help us understand and navigate an uncertain world.

This chapter provides a re-reading of Weber's theory of rationalization in which scientific ideas lay the groundwork for worldviews in politics and social science. The argument rests on a distinction between worldviews and cosmologies. Worldviews are local, coherent, and systematized collections of values and beliefs. Cosmologies are collections of ideas about the nature of the world and the universe. On this basis, the paper argues that rationalization can be understood as a process in which cosmological elements from scientific discourses lay the foundations of worldviews. Cosmological developments in the natural sciences have shaped and constrained the basis of worldviews in world politics. Moreover, the paper argues that the social sciences have also inherited scientific and colonial elements, which constrain their modes of representation and valuation.

In the context of a relational revolution across sciences and social sciences, the need to think through what relational perspectives mean has been an important new development in International Relations. This chapter explores the contributions of relational hyper-humanist perspectives, and relational cosmology in particular, in the context of climate challenge and other related questions, including how we might orient to questions around worldviews as set out in this project. It is argued that while challenging vis-à-vis more classical approaches to International Relations, these perspectives present interesting new challenges and questions to the field.

This chapter sets the stage for the empirical analyses that are presented in the following chapters. We first introduce data on power-sharing practices which are drawn from the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset, which documents ethnic groups' access to power since 1946. This part of the chapter introduces the data structures and describes trends in power sharing globally and by world region. It is shown that both territorial and governmental power sharing have seen increased use for several decades, with a possible tapering off in more recent years. We present a series of simple cross tabulations and regression analyses to set the baseline for the chapters to come. In the second part of the chapter, we turn to data on formal institutions. This part of the chapter relies on the new Inclusion Dispersion and Constraints (IDC) dataset that measures formal power-sharing provisions along several institutional dimensions. The chapter closes with an overview of how these data are used to address our Master Hypotheses in the subsequent empirical chapters.

We start this conceptual and theoretical chapter by recapitulating previous work on exclusion and civil war by outlining how it connects political exclusion and grievances with the onset of conflict. Consequently, if power sharing reduces inequality and exclusion, peace becomes more likely through a grievance-reducing effect. In addition, power sharing can also bring peace through confidence building. After defining the key notion of power sharing practices, we introduce our first Master Hypothesis about linking both governmental and territorial power-sharing practices to the reduction of civil conflict. The rest of the chapter advances four additional master hypotheses that correspond to the four initial challenges confronting research on power sharing and conflict that were introduced in Chapter 1. First, we derive Master Hypothesis 2 by arguing that practices channel the main conflict-reducing effect of formal power-sharing institutions and also reduce conflict even in the absence of formal institutions. According to Master Hypothesis 3, power-sharing practices have a pacifying effect both before and after the first conflict but the risk of conflict onset is generally higher in the latter case. With Master Hypothesis 4, we address the important issue of endogeneity by showing that governments introduce power-sharing arrangements mostly as a way to co-opt potentially violent challenges to their sovereign power. Finally, under the heading of Master Hypothesis 5, we show how territorial power sharing, especially in relationships already characterized by past violence, may be insufficient to build confidence in support of stable peace. In such cases, autonomy and other territorial approaches are more effective if combined with central power-sharing practices.

In this concluding chapter of the book, we summarize what we have found in the previous chapters and discuss the theoretical significance and limitations of our findings. Furthermore, based on these reflections, we provide some recommendations for policy making. In the first section we return to our master hypotheses that we introduced in Chapter 3. Most importantly, we conclude that there is robust evidence that both governmental and territorial power-sharing practices tend, on average, to reduce conflict compared to situations characterized by their absence (see Master Hypotheses 1a and 1b respectively). We summarize the findings pertaining to the other Master Hypotheses as well. The discussion on the limitations of our findings focuses primarily on implications of power sharing on other outcomes than peace and conflict, such as democracy and economic development, but also some of the simplifying assumptions that have supported our analysis, such as the unity of ethnic groups. Finally, the discussion of policy implications reminds the reader that our results are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Still our analysis sheds light on why critics of power sharing may have overstated their case. For instance, failure to consider implementation difficulties could render power sharing ineffective or even counter-productive. In particular, such practices may be particularly effective before the first outbreak of violence, which confirms the importance of conflict reduction through preventive measures, rather than merely through conflict resolution once conflict has already erupted.

This chapter explores how formal power-sharing institutions relate to power-sharing practices and demonstrates the importance of the latter. Applying causal mediation analysis, we use the Ethnic Power Relations dataset to measure power-sharing practices and the Inclusion Dispersion and Constraints dataset to capture formal power-sharing institutions. The first part of this chapter evaluates whether and why our argument might hold. First, formal power-sharing institutions are not always formally implemented as our analysis clearly demonstrated. Second, in addition to not being implemented, formal power-sharing institutions often fail to result in practices that accommodate ethnic groups. Third, practices that accommodate ethnic groups often emerge even in the absence of formal institutional provisions. These three points highlight that the exclusive institutional focus typically present in existing studies of the effect of power sharing is likely to be misleading. In the second part, we assess more systematically how formal institutions affect the likelihood of conflict onset through practices or other channels. Throughout our analyses, a common theme emerges: If formal institutions affect conflict onset at all, this effect is mainly mediated through power-sharing practices. We find the strongest, mediated effects for formal governmental power-sharing institutions. In contrast, the effects for territorial power sharing are less clear-cut. For governmental power sharing we have also been able to show that the effect of practices on conflict onset depends less on formal power-sharing institutions than on other factors. This result underlines even more forcefully our argument that practices are playing a pivotal role in the link between power sharing and conflict.