  The system of N particles moving on a circle and interacting via a global
repulsive cosine interaction is well known to display spatially inhomogeneous
structures of extraordinary stability starting from certain low energy initial
conditions. The object of this paper is to show in a detailed manner how these
structures arise and to explain their stability. By a convenient canonical
transformation we rewrite the Hamiltonian in such a way that fast and slow
variables are singled out and the canonical coordinates of a collective mode
are naturally introduced. If, initially, enough energy is put in this mode, its
decay can be extremely slow. However, both analytical arguments and numerical
simulations suggest that these structures eventually decay to the spatially
uniform equilibrium state, although this can happen on impressively long time
scales. Finally, we heuristically introduce a one-particle time dependent
Hamiltonian that well reproduces most of the observed phenomenology.
