Suchergebnisse

The article investigates the citizenship practices of urban Aymara in a neighbourhood of El Alto, Bolivia, through an examination of the municipal elections of December 1999. Using ethnographic methods, I focus on the instrumental and affective sides of clientelism, a central feature of Bolivian elections. I argue that clientelism is a part of citizenship practice, a means of engaging with the state in the person of the politician. A majority of the Bolivian population are marginalised from the oligarchic mestizo system of government, as represented by the traditional political parties. However, at local level, and especially during election campaigns, there is more permeability, and this article sees clientelism as a set of strategies through which citizens attempt to make politics, and politicians, more representative and responsive.

The study explores how struggles for social justice by Guatemalan and Ecuadorian indigenous peasant movements are affected by ethno-politics (the strategic political use of ethnicity), by using a comparative historical approach incorporating structural change and strategic agency. The analysis revolves around the partly enduring, partly changing oligarchic structures. The choice of the countries rests primarily upon the composition of their respective oligarchic classes. In Guatemala, the despotic agrarian oligarchs have dominated for much of the past century; whereas in Ecuador, the oligarchy was divided into an agrarian and a modernist fraction. Scholars often locate ethnic politicisation in Latin America within the context of a shift from 'national popular' and 'corporatist' political orders toward political and economic liberalisation. This shift supposedly unleashed ethnic identities which were previously subordinated by the way indigenous communities were politically incorporated. This study shows that dramatic openings for ethnic politicisation in the 1990s occurred where corporatism had been weak and oligarchic structures persisted. But the elites were unable to use ethnicity as a tool for hegemonic control. Due to the oligarchic legacy, class discourses could not be prevented from being reproduced, and ethnic ones were politicised in a way that is dysfunctional to the elites' effort to politically disarm the rural poor. Another finding is that the persisting influence of the agrarian oligarchy made the Guatemalan movement more focused on the land struggle and more unwilling/unable to integrate into the political arena prescribed by those in control of the state. In Ecuador, the demise of the agrarian oligarchy and the rise of a strong neo-liberal fraction constituted the context within which the movement moved away from the land struggle. It accessed the ethno-political spaces more firmly but resembled the Guatemalan movement in keeping its strategy of mass mobilisation.

The study of twentieth-century Argentine history is undergoing a radical transformation. Both Argentine and U.S. historians of Argentina are recasting the great debates in the historiography by challenging the Buenos Aires-centered focus of most of the existing historical scholarship and offering a new perspective on the country's modern history. Argentina's supposed 'exceptionalism' is being challenged by these historians. The persistence of political clientilism and oligarchic rule, enclave economies and pre-capitalist social relations, the role of traditional institutions such as the Church and family, intense class conflict and working class militancy, all approximate Argentina closer to the Latin American experience than the previous historiography would suggest. This book is a unique collaboration between Argentine and U.S. historians of this 'other Argentina.'

With unprecedented use of local and national sources, Lauria-Santiago presents a more complex portrait of El Salvador than has ever been ventured before. Using thoroughly researched regional case studies, Lauria-Santiago challenges the accepted vision of Central America in the nineteenth century and critiques the ""liberal oligarchic hegemony"" model of El Salvador. He reveals the existence of a diverse, commercially active peasantry that was deeply involved with local and national networks of power

In Indonesia, democratic transition has led to the ascendance of business in the political arena. A growing number of entrepreneurs-turned-politicians have captured the power of office, taking over positions which had previously been held by bureaucratic elites. In the existing literature, the ascendance of politically assertive business, often through democratization, is associated with the emergence of a less interventionist state. However, despite the expectation that post-Soeharto Indonesia would embark on a swift process of change towards a regulatory form of state, the patrimonial features of the Indonesian state continue to display more fundamental continuity. This article presents an alternative framework through which to better understand changing state-business relations in Indonesia. The article argues that the fall of the Soeharto regime in Indonesia has had the effect of facilitating the transformation of the patrimonial state: from a patrimonial administrative state to a patrimonial oligarchic state. Democratization has changed the old hierarchy of state-business relations over the distribution of patronage. In post-Soeharto Indonesia, business elites are no longer dependent on bureaucratic elites, as the former now enjoys direct access to state resources. (Contemp Southeast Asia/GIGA)

In April the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute hosted its Eighth Annual Strategy Conference at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. The theme for the 1997 Strategy Conference was "Russia's Future as a World Power." For two days, scholars, military professionals, and policymakers from the United States, Europe, and Russia engaged in a very useful exchange of ideas and viewpoints. Dr. Peter J. Stavrakis, of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, describes the emergence in Russia of a kind of oligarchic capitalism, controlled by old political elites, and thriving amidst an extra-legal "parallel shadow government." In short, rather than a Western-style free market plural democracy, Dr. Stavrakis contents that Russia's central power structures to date have derived from a fusion between corrupt government officials and private sector elites. Together they prey on the resources and the potentially productive elements of Russian society. Dr. Stavrakis paints an intriguing portrait of a Russian government that resembles the "weak" states of Africa more than those of Western Europe. He explores both similarities and critical distinctions between African systems and today's Russia. While the differences are telling, they do not auger well for a progressive Russian transition, either domestically or internationally. ; https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1175/thumbnail.jpg

This paper deals with the politics of patronage and piety in local elections by examining the role of and dilemma faced by Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the largest Muslim organisation in Indonesia, in a local electoral competition. Focusing on the 2017 local election in Brebes, Central Java, this article confirms previous scholarly works' findings of widespread patronage distribution and the impact of rising religious conservatism on electoral competition. However, this paper shows that piety and patronage politics neither necessarily maintain oligarchic rule nor provoke intolerance and violence. The case of the electoral competition in Brebes reveals that Islamic organisations in Indonesia are not immune from electoral politics, and due to institutional weaknesses of most political parties in Indonesia, will likely remain important political players by mobilising support in elections at both the local and national level. In a broader context, Islamic mobilisation in local elections in Indonesia helps understand the emergence of pious democracy in democratic Muslim-majority countries.

The civil war in El Salvador has produced, on the one hand, a struggle between the existing regime and a coalition of insurgent military and political organizations and, on the other hand, a struggle within the regime between the landed oligarchy and the reform-minded politicians of the Christian Democratic Party. This article presents a theoretical analysis of the political impact of the PDC's land reform program of 1980. The emergence of revolution is explained as the erosion of clientelist political structures that resulted from the rapid population growth and the shift to export agriculture over the course of the last century. Within this analytical framework, a model is derived to specify the relationships among land reform, oligarchic repression, insurgent violence, and the level of popular support for the regime. It is hypothesized that levels of support for the regime will be greatest in those political subdivisions in which land reform has been implemented and in which death squad violence had been curbed, and that this relationship should be strongest and most stable when the reforms create peasant cooperatives rather than individual smallholdings.

Introduction : leaving the path behind / Hillel David Soifer and Alberto Vergara -- Shining Path : the last peasant war in the Andes / José Luis Rénique and Adrián Lerner -- Civil wars and their consequences : the Peruvian armed conflict in comparative perspective / Livia Isabella Schubiger and David Sulmont -- From oligarchic domination to neoliberal governance : the Shining Path and the transformation of Peru's constitutional order / Maxwell A. Cameron -- The internal armed conflict and state capacity : institutional reforms and the effective exercise of authority / Hillel David Soifer and Everett A. Vieira III -- Impact and legacies of political violence in Peru's public universities / Eduardo Dargent and Noelia Chávez -- Peace for whom? legacies of gender-based violence in Peru / Jelke Boesten -- Indigenous activism and human rights NGOs in Peru : the unexpected consequences of armed conflict / Maritza Paredes -- Political violence and the defeat of the left / Paula Muñoz -- From a partisan right to the conservative archipelago : political violence and the transformation of the right-wing spectrum in contemporary Peru / Alberto Vergara and Daniel Encinas -- Public opinion, the specter of violence, and democracy in contemporary Peru / Arturo Maldonado, Jennifer L. Merolla, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister -- Contested memories of the Peruvian internal armed conflict / Paulo Drinot -- Conclusion / Steven Levitsky

The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction -- Part I. Theoretical and Empirical Context -- Chapter 1. Populism, Moral Economy, Informality -- Chapter 2. Ukrainian Political Economy -- Part II. The City -- Chapter 3. From a Military Outpost to an Oligarchic Stronghold -- Chapter 4. Archaeology of Power Regimes of Domination Reflected in the Urban Infrastructure -- Part III. The Factory -- Chapter 5. Informality and Hierarchies at the Post-Soviet Workplace -- Chapter 6. Paternalism in Decay -- Chapter 7. Politicized Embeddedness, Depoliticized Disembeddedness -- Part IV. Everyday Politics -- Chapter 8. Distinction and Class -- Chapter 9. Mapping Lay Virtues on the National Political Landscape -- Chapter 10. Political Attitudes and Attitude to Politics -- Conclusion -- Epilogue -- References -- Index.

AbstractFollowing the onset of mass politics in early twentieth-century Latin America, party systems were distinguished by different patterns of labor incorporation. In some countries, political competition was realigned by the emergence of a mass-based, labor-mobilizing populist or leftist party. In other countries, party systems remained under the control of traditional oligarchic parties or elite personalities who provided little impetus for labor mobilization. Countries with labor-mobilizing party systems were more deeply embedded in the state-led model of capitalist development known as import substitution industrialization in the middle of the twentieth century, and they suffered severe economic trauma when this development model collapsed in the debt crisis of the 1980s. Economic austerity and free-market reforms undermined the social foundations of these party systems, which experienced sharp declines in trade-union density and widespread electoral volatility during the waning decades of the twentieth century.

ABSTRACT:This article uses the evidence of the internal decoration and spatial hierarchy of an English town hall to explore the construction of urban oligarchy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Urban historians have regarded this period as one of fundamental importance in the political history of pre-modern English towns. It is associated with the emergence of the 'close corporation', an oligarchic form of government which remained largely in place until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. The article examines the iconography and historical context of a tapestry, custom-made for the town hall of Coventry around 1500, to present a different view of the character of urban political culture at the end of the Middle Ages.

Social movement scholars have rarely paid attention to the transformations of capitalism as factors of social movement formation processes. This paper makes two different but complementary contributions. First, we provide a macro-social theory that connects the emergence of social movements to the capital circuit in order to embed social movement formation processes into the structural dynamics of capitalism. Exploring such dynamics is helpful to the understanding of social movements if one only looks at them by highlighting their socio-political—and not only merely economic—nature. Secondly, we show how and to what extent some institutional transformations involving the politics of advanced capitalist societies have been affected by the capital circuit and vice versa. More notably, we argue that these transformations have given rise to a political field centered on the ambivalence between two poles, namely, a regressive-oligarchic and a participative-mobilizing one, which is the domain of populist politics today.