John McGarry was born in Northern Ireland in 1957 and emigrated to Canada in 1981. He received his BA from Trinity College Dublin and his MA and PhD from the University of Western Ontario. He has taught in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University since 2002, where he is currently Stephen Gyimah Distinguished University Professor. McGarry has advised many governments, and the United Nations, on power-sharing and ethnic conflict resolution. In 2008-09, he served as the first senior advisor on power-sharing at the United Nations (Mediation Support Unit, Department of Political Affairs). He is currently the lead advisor on governance to the UN Good Offices Mission in Cyprus. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2010) and an Officer of the Order of Canada (2016). He is also a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2013), the Killam Prize in the Social Sciences (2013), the Molson Prize in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2016) and the Pearson Peace Medal (2022).
The Politics of Domination: Taking, Keeping, and Losing Control over Other Peoples
2026
Presents a significant new theoretical interpretation of domination, showing that it cannot be understood without considering the domination site's domestic and external environment
Presents a comprehensive inventory of the stratagems that domination regimes use to dominate
Offers a series of lessons for the three main agents involved in domination regimes: elites, from outside, from the dominating community, and from the dominated community
Description
This book examines the political subordination and repression of one or more peoples by another people and its elites within the same polity. This sort of domination is surprisingly more common than we may think, given the value we are said to place on multiculturalism, equality, and human freedom. If we use one plausible proxy for domination - the intentional, targeted, and active exclusion by state authorities of an ethnic community from political power - then forty-two of the world's countries in 2021, some 23 per cent, practised domination, and a total of seventy-two communities were dominated.
Domination is seen here as an intentional strategy, not simply an unintended consequence of a dominant people's numbers or power. Correspondingly, the book identifies domination regimes by the “stratagems” they use to dominate. It explains how such regimes are established, maintained, and end.
The book proposes two core theses. First, little can be understood about the rise and fall of domination regimes unless their domestic and external (international) environments, including the interaction between them, are considered. In particular, it is argued that dominated peoples are unlikely to be able to escape from domination by themselves but are likely to need help from outside. Second, domination should not be considered, as some have claimed, a preferred “alternative” to even worse strategies, such as genocide or expulsions, but, rather, as something that facilitates these alternatives.
Show more
Read more
Disguising ethnic domination as accommodation or integration
2024
This article examines how and why regimes that dominate particular ethnic communities on behalf of a dominant one disguise themselves by claiming to practice accommodation (consociational power-sharing and territorial autonomy) or integration (equal citizenship with respect for private cultural differences). It also explains how to distinguish authentic accommodation and integration from the sham forms used by these regimes. The article seeks to help identify domination regimes that would otherwise be overlooked. This is important for academics. It is also important for international policymakers who seek to condemn domination and make it more difficult to maintain.
Read more
