In this book I present a philosophical argument about deliberative democracy and its relevance for the resolution of ethno-political conflict in divided societies. Although my approach is philosophical, I take a broad view of the kinds of considerations that are relevant to normative or evaluative thought. More specifically, I agree with Robert Goodin and Phillip Pettit ‘that questions about what can feasibly be achieved in a certain area are just as central to normative concerns as questions about what is desirable in that area’ (1993: 1). Political philosophy is concerned with the way in which political institutions and practices ideally ought to be arranged, rather than with the way they actually are arranged. For this reason, the arguments that political philosophers make inevitably stand at a certain, if indeterminate, remove from the particular circumstances in which those arguments are to apply. In this book, however, I take it as a guiding assumption that there is little point in advancing normative arguments that are so far removed from empirical realities and constraints that they fail to provide policy makers with any real practical guidance.

Accordingly, I aim to show that deliberative democracy provides normative or evaluative standards not just towards which the members of divided societies should aspire, but also towards which they can aspire, even if only in the longer run. Of course, the obvious difficulty is how to strike an appropriate balance between normative concerns and empirical constraints. As Goodin points out, the ‘case for some sort of empirical theory informing policy choices is intuitively obvious.