Jenny Pearce

From Civil War to ‘Civil Society’: Has the End of the Cold War Brought Peace to Central America?

Revisiting one arena of the Cold War—Central America—which dominated international headlines in the 1980s, this article explores its legacy on the region. It asks whether the ending of the Cold War and the peace accords which concluded the internal wars of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in 1990, 1992 and 1996, respectively, have brought sustainable peace, development and democracy. In particular, it explores the changing agenda of international financial and development agencies which have supported the postwar reconstruction of the region. The experiences of Nicaragua and El Salvador have shown that failure to coordinate the efforts at economic adjustment with those of peace-building compromised the possibilities of development and democratization, particularly for the poorest sectors of the population. Conservative elites who emerged intact from the war were able to consolidate their economic power, and resist and limit political reform, while handing responsibility for the poor and the former war zones to international agencies. The latter have shifted their agenda in the Guatemalan peace process, incorporating a strategy of ‘civil society strengthening’ in order to build capacity within society to create more accountable and democratic states. The conclusion of the article explores the ambiguities of this strategy. On the positive side it legitimizes and protects the newly won but fragile freedoms of speech and association in the region; on the negative side, it risks turning a historical social and political dynamic into externally funded ‘projects’ with limited sustainability, whose outcome many international agencies tend to assume they can shape to their own expectations.

Promised land : peasant rebellion in Chalatenango, El Salvador

Traces the history of the northern Salvadorean province of Chalatenango. Including oral histories from local people, it examines the economic prressures that pushed the peasantry into desparation, and the political evolution behind the revolutionary war.

Civil society, the market and democracy in Latin America

‘Civil society’ has been used in a confusing variety of ways in Latin America by academics, policy‐makers, non‐governmental organizations and activists. This article explores the ambiguities in the usages of the concept over the last decade in a bid to rescue it from the danger of abandonment for having become all things to all people. If used rigorously, the concept remains a useful analytical tool for exploring the process and progress of democratization and capitalist development in Latin America. It encourages us to ask what difference a vibrant associational life can make to building more inclusive and sustainable democracies in Latin America. The case of Chile is used as an example of how ‘civil society’ opens up new questions for research in a country which many hail as the most successful example of economic and political liberalization in Latin America.

Conclusion Participation as a Field of Study and Practice: A Modest Contribution

In the Introduction, we distinguished two frameworks for understanding our case studies: ‘participatory governance’ and ‘participatory democracy’. An initial task of this conclusion is to discuss how far these illuminate differences in the participatory experiments we tracked. The Introduction also identified two research goals. The first was to learn more about the prospects for participation as a democratic option for society and thus contribute to participation as a field of study in its own right. The second was to elaborate the meaning of what is sometimes referred to as ‘real’ participation or participation as meaningful practice. In 1969, Sherry Arnstein in the US produced a conceptual tool with this in mind, the much quoted ‘ladder of participation’ which distinguished between nonparticipation, tokenistic participation and citizen participation (Arnstein, 2007). Arnstein’s argument was about more than the tool, however. The author recognised that the ladder was a deceptively simple approach to ‘powerlessness’ and ‘powerholders’ (Ibid., p. 236). While these categories rightly permeate our studies, we also learn how the governed as well as the governors create their own structures of power. These also impact on how far experiments generate new possibilities.

Co-Producing Knowledge Critical Reflections on Researching Participation

Participation is not just about democracy. It is also about how we relate to each other in all our spaces of encounter. Do we give space to the other person to have an equal part in the encounter, or do we begin from the premise of a one-way communication? Our research could not study participation and fail to ask how we intended to relate to research participants. We could not reconcile our subject matter with a research process which extracted their experience, turned it into academic knowledge and published it only in inaccessible academic formats. We sought a way of acknowledging the contribution of our research participants to the production of knowledge, to involve them in ongoing discussions about emergent ideas and to feedback what came out of the research in a form which was useful to their activities. We called this ‘co-producing knowledge’. Inevitably, our aspirations did not match up with reality. We had to reconcile the methodology with conventional demands for evidence in qualitative enquiry and for outputs, such as this book, which satisfy peer review rather than that of our research participants. However, through our sincere efforts to interact rather than extract from the ‘researched’, we consider that all participants deepened their knowledge by exchanging it. This chapter explains what we did and did not achieve.

Toward a Post-Representational Politics?: Participation in the 21St Century

Representational democracy has been the main form of government in the West since the English, American, and French revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, there are indications that its ability to frame the relationship between citizen and state has begun to weaken. This weakening can be traced to many factors. One of these is the emergence of new collective actors, such as social movements, and the (re)recognition of the arena of “civil society” just as the articulating power of political parties began to erode. Although these emerged initially under the umbrella of the nation state, toward the end of the 20th century a qualitatively new dynamic of networked social activism illustrated that the nation-state was no longer the only location for political action and the exercise of citizenship. These trends point to a new participatory dynamic, which could not yet be said to offer a serious challenge to representative forms of politics, but that arguably marks the beginning of the decline of that form. However, we are far from understanding how a participatory democracy might replace representational government. This article argues that we should begin now to discuss the uncomfortable gaps in our understanding of what “qualifies” participation, in order to develop a new theory of new practice and strengthen the content and potential of this new political imaginary.

Beyond Shock: Does Latin America Offer a New ‘Doctrine’?

In an interview in The Observer (4 January 2009), UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared ‘we are in favour of free markets but not value-free markets’. Klein’s powerful exposition of the manner in which free markets were promoted around the world since the 1970s suggests that free markets do come attached to values. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, first published in 1944 and a strong influence on the neoliberals of later years, was a moral as well as economic treatise against collectivism and central planning and what he argued was their inevitable descent into tyranny. Indeed, Stalin’s communism and Hitler’s national socialism exacted a huge cost in human life, as, argues Klein, has market liberalism in later years. However, the neoliberals claim that the strength of market-driven growth lies in the fact that the market is morally neutral, and can thus operate without the distortions that governments introduce. In this way, Milton Friedman could argue, disingenuously for Klein and it is hard to disagree, that the adoption of his economic recipes in Chile after Pinochet’s coup did not involve an endorsement of dictatorship. Klein’s book gives us a potent weapon against such neoliberal claims. It is neoliberalism’s commitment to the overriding value of individual freedom in the market place that induced its proponents to place political freedom as secondary to it. Only later did they try to argue that the political liberalisations of the 1990s were the inevitable corollary of economic liberalisation. As the world contemplates the demise of neoliberalism but not necessarily of free markets, we are left wondering how do and how should politics and economics relate to each other. If the former is not to be subordinated to the latter, how can the political sphere generate the values to underpin an ethical economics? In the aftermath of neoliberalism’s latest shock, this time on itself and notably in the Anglo-American heartlands of its birth, most people invoke the memory of Keynes or call for a new Keynes. Such calls suggest we may be doomed merely to the cyclical swings between the ‘corruption of power’ and the ‘corruption of money’, in which ‘crisis’, as Klein discusses, ushers in the shift from one to New Political Economy, Vol. 14, No. 3, September 2009

Manchester Between the Grassroots and City Hall: Participation in a Global City

This chapter explores the disconnect between the grassroots, the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and City Hall. Although new spaces for participation in the city opened up in the new millennium, they remained embedded in a complex set of established relationships and patterns of decision making. In Manchester City Council’s bid for global city status, with its much acclaimed city centre renovation, there is little enthusiasm for central government’s emphasis on community engagement mediated through the VCS. The community contribution to the city ‘vision’ remains marginal and contingent upon funding, mediators and the goodwill of the representative state. In the Manchester case, the local state has a strong sense that accountability comes through the electoral process. Despite enthusiastic and challenging ideas on community engagement outside the local state, in the end the strategy has emanated from within it, attempting to draw in the VCS, which in turn has found it hard to articulate and implement a distinct approach with equal claims to legitimacy. However, the creative approach to new spaces for participation through the national community empowerment paradigm constituted an effort to reconnect the grassroots with City Hall. The Manchester case analyses the limits and potential of these efforts.

Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (review)

The small, densely populated Central American republic of El Salvador has generated a large number of high quality monographs aiming to explain the character of its long and violent civil war. A few, like this one, draw on regional and subregional case studies; here they are from Tenancingo and Usulatan. This book is one of the most outstanding of these studies, and in itself contributes to explaining the intense interest in this country from outsiders.