Donald L. Horowitz

Donald L. Horowitz (born 1939) is James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Law and Political Science at Duke Law School and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, United States.

He earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1968 and also holds degrees from Syracuse University. He is a specialist in the study of ethnic conflict and author of the books Ethnic Groups in Conflict (University of California Press, 1985), A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (University of California Press, 1991), The Deadly Ethnic Riot (University of California Press, 2001) and Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Writing about Ethnic Groups in Conflict, political scientist Ashutosh Varshney states that it "was a seminal text", and that: "For the first time in scholarly history, a book on ethnic conflict covered a whole variety of topics, ranging from concepts and definitions to those spheres of institutional politics (party politics, military politics, affirmative action) in which the power of ethnicity had become obvious and could no longer be ignored".

Horowitz has acted as a consultant on the problems of divided societies and on policies to reduce ethnic conflict in locations including Russia, Romania, Nigeria, Tatarstan and Northern Ireland. In 2006, he was appointed to Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion.

Centripetalism

Centripetalism, sometimes called integrationism, developed out of the criticism of consociationalism by Horowitz. It is a form of democratic power sharing for divided societies (usually along ethnic, religious or social lines) which aims to encourage the parties towards moderate and compromising policies and to reinforce the center of a divided political spectrum. Both models aim to provide institutional prescriptions for divided societies.