Power-Sharing in Zanzibar: From Zero-Sum Politics to Democratic Consensus?

Aley Soud Nassor and Jim Jose

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2014, vol. 40, issue 2, 247-265

Abstract: Power-sharing has become a common strategy to resolve political conflicts in Africa. However, it has rarely survived for very long, and much of the scholarship on power-sharing remains largely negative. Yet Zanzibar's power-sharing approach, adopted in 2010, points to a more positive democratic possibility. We explore the background to this development, note some of the issues behind the move to power-sharing, and look briefly at its implementation following the 2010 elections. We argue that Zanzibar's power-sharing strategy appears to have ended the zero-sum nature of Zanzibari politics, ushering in a more consensus-based approach reminiscent of Julius Nyerere's concept of ujamaa. For Nyerere ujamaa was a specifically African alternative to the institutionalised oppositional politics of western liberal democracy. We conclude that Zanzibar's experiment in power-sharing demonstrates that a multi-party political system need not be structured according to a two-party oppositional model in order to achieve stable and functional democratic government.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2014.896719 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:40:y:2014:i:2:p:247-265

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2014.896719

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().