In this article, we consider elements of sharing, space, and time involved in analyzing cases of shared and contested religious space. We draw on comparative data and use a model of competitive sharing of religious sites, or “Antagonistic Tolerance,” that we are developing with an interdisciplinary and international group of colleagues. A key concept which we explain in this project is that of the religioscape, the distribution in spaces through time of the physical manifestations of specific religious traditions and of the populations that build them. We demonstrate what we see as the advantages of this approach over the more customary one of looking at individual sites as if they were isolated in space and time. Examples are drawn from Portugal, Anatolia, and the post-Ottoman Balkans.

The social science literature on ethnically divided states is huge and varied, but suggestions for constitutional solutions are strangely uniform: “loose federations” of ethnically defined ministates, with minimal central authority that must act by consensus and thus cannot act at all on issues that are contested rather than consented. In Bosnia, the political system mandated by the international High Representative suffer the same structural flaws that were used to make the former Yugoslav federation and the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina unworkable. Similarly nonviable systems were proposed in 1994 to 1995 for Croatia and in 1998 to 1999 for Kosovo and recently for Cyprus and for Iraq. This article analyzes the paradox of mandating consensus-based politics in ethnically divided states, inclusion in which does not have the consent of most members of at least one group.