Building Democratic States after Conflict: Institutional Design Revisited Stefan Wolff Centre for International Crisis Management and Conflict Resolution School of Politics and International Relations University of Nottingham stefan.wolff@nottingham.ac.uk Charles T. Call with Vanessa Wyeth, eds, Building States to Build Peace. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008. 438pp. (ISBN 978-1-58826-480-0 paperback). Sujit Choudhry, ed., Constitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation? Oxford University Press, 2008. 474pp. (ISBN 978-0-19-953541-5 hardback). Anna K. Jarstad and Timothy D. Sisk, eds, From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding. Cambridge University Press, 2008. 290pp. (ISBN 978-0-521-71327-6 paperback). Pippa Norris, Driving Democracy: Do Power-sharing Institutions Work? Cambridge University Press, 2008. 306pp. (ISBN 978-0-521-69480-3 paperback). Introduction Few debates have engulfed the literatures of comparative politics and international relations for as long and as intensively as that between advocates of different schools of thought on how to build stable and democratic polities in divided societies. Especially when such societies emerge from often long and vicious conflict, the task is formidable at the best of times, and the track record of success patchy. The question, therefore, which approach is the most promising to attain the twin goals of peace and democracy is not merely academic navel-gazing but of immediate and lasting relevance to the countries embarking on state-building after conflict and is, by extension, often also significant in its implications for regional and international security more broadly. It is, thus, to be welcomed that scholars of political science and international relations, as well as relevant related disciplines, such as constitutional and international law, continue to engage with the issue of democratic state-building after conflict-and that they do so in an increasingly constructive fashion. This is not to suggest that any of the enduring rivalries in the field of conflict settlement have been resolved, but rather that the debate has become more sophisticated in the conclusions it offers. This is partly because of the growing interdisciplinarity of the engagements (in particular the contributions made by legal scholars), and partly because of the richer empirical basis from which arguments are derived. All four books reviewed for this essay display these characteristics in one way or another and make important contributions to what remains an ongoing debate far from conclusion. The existing literature on state-building more generally, and the four recent contributions to it reviewed here more specifically, do not dispute the importance of designing institutional frameworks within which disputes between different conflict parties can be accommodated such that political compromise becomes preferable to violent struggle. In fact, there is wide agreement that ―it is […] in divided societies that institutional arrangements have the greatest impact [and that] institutional design can systematically favour or disadvantage ethnic, national, and religious groups (Belmont et al. 2002:3). Consequently, while there is agreement that institutions matter because they can provide the context in which differences can be accommodated and managed in a nonviolent, political way, the existing literature on post-conflict state-building offers no consensus view about which of the most suitable institutions are to achieve this. While much of the state-building debate (cf., for example, Noel 2005; O‘Flynn and Russel 2005; Roeder and Rothchild 2005; Taylor 2009) is consumed with normative and