Children’s Ethno-National Flag Categories in Three Divided Societies

Embedding the Flag Representation in Divided Powers

A generalization of a theorem of Crabb and Hubbuck concerning the embedding of flag representations in divided powers is given, working over an arbitrary finite field F, using the category of functors from finite-dimensional F-vector spaces to F-vector spaces.

Constitutional Design for Divided Societies

Over the past half-century, democratic constitutional design has undergone a sea change. After the Second World War, newly independent countries tended simply to copy the basic constitutional rules of their former colonial masters, without seriously considering alternatives. Today, constitution writers choose more deliberately among a wide array of constitutional models, with various advantages...

Electoral Systems for Divided Societies

What kinds of electoral systems can help democracy survive in countries split by deep cleavages of race, religion, language, or ethnicity? As is well-known, politicians in such “divided societies” often have strong incentives to “play the ethnic card” at election time, using communal appeals to mobilize voters. “Outbidding”—increasingly extreme rhetoric and demands—can offer rewards greater tha...

Categories of Artificial Societies

We investigate the concept of artificial societies and identify a number of separate classes of such societies. These are compared in terms of openness, flexibility, stability, and trustfulness. The two most obvious types of artificial societies are the open societies, where there are no restrictions for joining the society, and the closed societies, where it is impossible for an “external agen...

Territorial Approaches to Conflict Resolution in Divided Societies