Democratic Deliberation in Deeply Divided Societies:

Through case-analysis and cross-sectional assessment of eleven countries this collection explores the most deeply divided societies in the world in order to highlight what deliberative democracy looks like in a deeply divided society and to understand the conditions that deliberative democracies could realistically emerge in difficult circumstances

"The book is global in orientation with cases as diverse as Iran and Belgium, Colombia and Nigeria. (...) The real strength of the book stems from the generalizations that emerge from the comparison of these cases. Through the analysis of historical, institutional, cultural and psychological factors, it becomes clear where the potential, but also the limits for deliberation in deeply divided societies are." - Jurg Steiner, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and University of Bern, Switzerland

Juan E. Ugarriza earned his PhD from the Institute of Political Science at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Previously, he received an MA in history at the University of North Carolina, United States. His areas of academic interest are the deepening of democracy in contexts of conflict and the role of ideology in the twenty-first century. His work has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the International Journal of Conflict Management and the Journal of Public Deliberation. Currently, he is a faculty professor and researcher at El Rosario University (Bogota) and leads a team of researchers exploring the use of deliberative practices as a political reconciliation strategy in postconflict Colombia.Didier Caluwaerts is a Democracy fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School and a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research focuses on deliberative and participatory democracy in ethnically divided societies, and his work has been published in the European Political Science Review and the Journal of Public Deliberation.