Pulling Together: Shared Intentions, Deliberative Democracy and Deeply Divided Societies

Abstract

If deeply divided societies are to make the move from conflict to peace and democracy, their communities must pull together. While togetherness can be construed in different ways, its basic logic can be spelt out in terms of the notion of a ‘shared intention’. Accordingly, the burden of this article is to argue that developing shared intentions between conflicting communities is important for overcoming their conflict and to explain why deliberation is a better instrument than bargaining for developing them. Deliberation involves and promotes more extensive and robust shared intentions than bargaining and hence enables a stronger sense of togetherness between communities to emerge.