The effects of elite-led power sharing on postconflict urban reconstruction: consociationalism and the Mostar case

Cities divided by war and political violence are a global phenomenon. These divided cities become the manifestations of regional, national, or global conflicts. Planners in such cities face a unique set of challenges; however, the effects of specific local governing systems on planning in divided cities remains understudied. Consociational democracy is a system of elite-led, power-sharing government commonly instituted in countries following ethnic conflicts. The benefits and costs of consociational government are well-documented at the national scale, but less so at the municipal level (even though divided cities have instituted consociational governments). This thesis will identify the ways in which consociational municipal government affects the post-conflict reconstruction and planning process. Following the literature, I will theorize four propositions of how ethnic consociationalism affects city-wide urban planning. The central case study will be Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a noteworthy city in which the government was (until recently) consociational at the municipal level. The case study will demonstrate that municipal consociationalism begets unplanned border zones, the non-implementation of rational/technical-styled plans, the reification of conflict into built form, and a power-vacuum into which external, non-municipal-governmental actors enter. Given the importance of urban planning and reconstruction following today’s “urbicidal” wars, these revelations show how post-conflict consociational electoral engineering at the local level creates specific scenarios planners should address with pointed interventions