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Consociational democracy as the goal and a tool in mitigating conflict in the Third World has been frequently used during the last decades, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. The results are ambiguous. The aim of this comparative case study is to examine the Arusha Accords of Rwanda signed August 3, 1993, and the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi of August 28, 2000, in relation to the elements and favorable conditions of Arend Lijphart’s theory on Consociational Democracy as presented in "Democracy in Plural Societies" 1977. The study concludes that the slightly different conditions in the cases, Rwanda and Burundi, both historical and contemporary had potential effects on the diverging outcome of the cases. The major difference between the cases was, however, the different ways the agreements handled the overshadowing main cleavage of ethnicity, which according to Lijphart is crucial.