Power sharing and its diverse federal arrangements are insufficient to solve without partition conflicts evolving around the de facto States. I propose to depart from the purely institutional approach and look for incentives at different levels which might break the impasse. Comparing justifications underlying demands for independence in Transnistria and in Abkhazia permits to identify such processes: economic seduction and historical reconciliation. The article goes by the transformative approach which combines parallel, complementary and adapted political processes, favourable to eventual institutional arrangements. It also introduces the emotional/historic element of hostilities, generally neglected in political science.