U.S. and Non-U.S. Scholars

Fulbright New Century Scholars Program
Overview • Previous NCS Programs • NCS Scholar List • NCS Brochure • 2002-2003

Anthony Oberschall

Emeritus Professor
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Department of Sociology
Shared Sovereignty and Power Sharing Governance in Deeply Divided Societies
United States

Born in Budapest in 1936, Tony Oberschall was educated at Harvard and at Columbia, where he earned a PhD in sociology in 1962. Since 1980, he has been on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He currently teaches international conflict management in a joint UNC-Duke University program on Peace and Conflict Resolution sponsored by Rotary International.

Prof. Oberschall has been visiting lecturer and researcher in East and Central Africa, China, France, Germany and Hungary. He has published five books and some 100 articles in scholarly journals, many of which deal with collective action, social conflict, group violence, and conflict management. Recently he has researched and written about the break-up of Yugoslavia and post-war reconstruction and governance in the Balkans.

Selected Publications:

Social Conflict and Social Movements, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973.
Social Movements: Interests, Ideologies and Identities. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction
Books, 1993.
"The Manipulation of Ethnicity: From Cooperation to Violence and War in Yugoslavia." Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (6), November 2000: 982-1001.
"How to Prevent Genocide." Contemporary Sociology 29 (1) 2000: 1-12.

My NCS project is concerned with institutions for governance and cooperation in deeply divided societies, i.e. how to establish some normalcy after protracted civil wars and insurgencies. In some situations the core conflict is about national/ethnic identity and statehood: neither group wants to be a minority in one state when it could be a majority in another state. The conflict is a complex web of identity, territoriality, security, justice and statehood. Although several modes of governance (e.g. federation, autonomy) have been tried in deeply divided societies, I want to explore the feasibility and acceptability of shared sovereignty (two states sharing authority in a territory), and how this would work in Northern Ireland. On top of charting the institutional, administrative and legal contours (e.g. modes of taxation, of policing) I plan to interview political leaders, civil servants, academics, media and opinion leaders in Northern Ireland, U.K. and Eire to find out whether shared sovereignty can be made feasible and acceptable to the peoples of Northern Ireland, and whether it might satisfy their nationality, security, identity and justice concerns in a lasting fashion.