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Pulling Together: Shared Intentions, Deliberative Democracy and Deeply Divided Societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2015

Ian O’Flynn
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Abstract

If deeply divided societies are to make the move from conflict to peace and democracy, their communities must pull together. While togetherness can be construed in different ways, its basic logic can be spelt out in terms of the notion of a ‘shared intention’. Accordingly, the burden of this article is to argue that developing shared intentions between conflicting communities is important for overcoming their conflict and to explain why deliberation is a better instrument than bargaining for developing them. Deliberation involves and promotes more extensive and robust shared intentions than bargaining and hence enables a stronger sense of togetherness between communities to emerge.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 187 - 202
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Politics, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University (email: ian.o’flynn@ncl.ac.uk). The author thanks Peter Jones for many helpful discussions about this article; and also André Bächtiger, Derek Bell, Nicole Curato, John Dryzek, Bob Goodin, Michael James, Hannu Nurmi, David Russell, Annie Stilz, Jonathan Tomm, Albert Weale and three anonymous referees for this Journal for their insightful written comments. Earlier drafts were presented at the LSE, the University of Geneva, the ANU and the University of Turku. The author reports learning a great deal on each occasion.

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