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The author reflects on current trends to explore the historical record of the injustices of colonial racism and slavery, and raises the question of whether this changed mood of regret over the past bears any relation to, or significance for, the ongoing depredations visited on the most impoverished of the world today. For these still appear largely invisible. In the process, he encompasses the growing threat of catastrophic global warming and environmental disaster – and some of the movements struggling against this. He excoriates a global system of continuous economic expansion whereby the poor have become a little less poor as the rich have become abusively, unimaginably richer.

AbstractConsociation, one type of power‐sharing, is perhaps the least appreciated. This article reviews and replies to a collection celebrating Arend Lijphart's pioneering article on consociational democracy published in 1969. The consociational perspective retains its interpretive power, including in the examination of major polities, such as the European Union, the Indian Union, and the USA. In the classical cases, consociational persistence in Belgium and Switzerland contrasts with decay or dissolution in Austria and the Netherlands. Whether the Good Friday Agreement over Northern Ireland demonstrates that consociation rewards ethnic extremism remains unproven. Far from being an exhausted research program, the consociational theme remains vibrant within comparative political analysis, and in the repertoire for managing deeply divided places. No one has ever claimed that consociation is a panacea for national, ethnic, religious or linguistic conflict. Yet the principles of parity, proportionality, autonomy, and minority veto‐rights remain cogent in analysis and political prescription.