ABSTRACT
Institutional designs in multiethnic societies are infinitely varied. Given the variety of contexts that constitutional engineers encounter, this is hardly surprising. At the same time, however, variation is often a question of detail and there are far fewer principal mechanisms of conflict settlement than settlements as such. Very prominent among such principal mechanisms are consociational power-sharing and territorial autonomy. As the latter has been extensively dealt with in the introduction to this volume, I will focus my attention at the beginning of this chapter on the nature of consociations.
