Luis Roniger

Democracy, clientelism, and civil society

The comparative study of clientelism and the changing nature of civil society in the contemporary world, L. Roniger clientelism, political culture, and participation in the late twentieth century, A. Gunes-Ayata. Case studies: peasants, patrons, and the state in Portugal, M.C. Silva clientelism in contemporary Turkey, A. Gunes-Ayata clientelism in Canadian provincial politics - evolution of democracy?, M. Fletcher clientele and citizenship - peasant politics in Northern Colombia, C. Escobar development, clientelism, and one-party dominance in Mexico and India, S. Streiner images of clientelism and realities of patronage in Israel, L. Roniger the clientelism of the KMT regime in Taiwan, F. Wang. Conclusion: the transformation of clientelism and civil society, the editors.

The legacy of human rights violations in the Southern Cone : Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay

Introduction Repression and the Discourse of Human Rights Violations in the Southern Cone Shaping the Public Sphere and the Legacy of Human Right Violations National Reconciliation and the Disruptive Potential of the Legacy of Human Rights Violations Restructuring the Realm of Human Rights in the Southern Cone The Multiple Refraction of the Various Institutional Paths Memory and Oblivion in the Redemocratized Southern Cone The Transformation of Collective Identities in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay Conclusions

From pioneer to freier: The changing models of generalized exchange in Israel

This study analyzes a major shift in the Israeli discourse of generalized exchange as reflected in key role models and images of social involvement, voluntarism and public good provision. It highlights the progressive decline of the image of the pioneer or ‘halutz’ and the parallel emergence of the image of the ‘freier’, a vernacular model of a sucker, as a meta-comment on the pioneer model and on Israeli existence in general (2).

Civil Society, Patronage and Democracy

This article explores the relationship of contemporary analyses of civil society to research venues dealing with the transformational capacity of patronage, at work in democracies. It has two aims. The first is to offer an approach to civil society that is based on both the formal characteristics as well as the pragmatic dimensions of contemporary state-society relationships. The second is to show that within this theoretical approach, patronage appears as an integral part of many modern democratic regimes and must be treated as such in order to publicize the private domain and thus avoid the privatization of the public domain.

The politics of exile in Latin America

1. Defining the Exilic Condition 2. Forceful Displacement, the Construction of Collective Identities and State Formation 3. The Format of Exile 4. Sites of Exile 5. Widening Exclusion and the Four-Tiered Structure of Exile 6. Exile Communities, Activism and Politics 7. Presidents in Exile 8. Is Return the End of Exile?

From Argentina to Israel: Escape, Evacuation and Exile

During the last military dictatorship in Argentina, between 350 and 400 citizens who feared for their life managed to find shelter in Israel. This article traces the evolving procedures, institutional mechanisms and routes of escape operated by the Israeli diplomats and representatives stationed in Argentina and the neighbouring countries, against the contradictory background of lack of clear-cut official policies in Israel, the latters cordial relationships with the military government, and an ethos of helping persecuted Jews evinced by some of those Israelis stationed in Argentina. In parallel, the article presents the social and political background of those who chose to appeal for Israeli help and finds – on the basis of a specially designed database covering between fifty-seven and sixty-five per cent of the fleeing individuals – that many were not associated with Israel or Zionism and a minority were not Jews, as defined by religious criteria or even by broader criteria. The broader significance of these contradictory trends is discussed.

Exile Communities and Their Differential Institutional Dynamics: A Comparative Analysis of the Chilean and Uruguayan Political Diasporas

Resumen es: El articulo se concentra en la pluralidad de las experiencias de exilio politico tal como se manifiestan en las comunidades de exiliados chilenos y urug...

Transitional Justice and Protracted Accountability in Re-democratised Uruguay, 1985–2011

This article analyses the protracted process by which democratised Uruguay has come to terms with its legacy of human rights violations. Central to this process has been the nature of Uruguayan transitional policies and their more recent partial unravelling. Due to the negotiated transition to electoral democracy, civilian political elites approached the transitional dilemma of balancing normative expectations and political contingency by promulgating legal immunity, for years avoiding initiatives to pursue trials or launch an official truth commission, unlike neighbouring Argentina. A constellation of national and transnational factors (including recurrent initiatives by social and political forces) eventually opened up new institutional ground for belated truth-telling and accountability for some historical wrongs – and yet, attempts to challenge the blanket legal impunity failed twice through popular consultation and in a recent parliamentary vote. Each time, the government officially projected a narrative that sacralised national consensus and reconciliation, now enshrined in two sovereign popular votes, and the adoption of a forward-looking democratic perspective.

Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in Latin America

Political exile, a major political practice in all Latin American countries throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is still an underresearched topic. While ubiquitous and fascinating, until recently it has been conceived as somewhat marginal to the development of these societies and has been studied in the framework of traditional concepts and concerns in history and the social sciences. Accordingly, one can find numerous biographical monographs that mention exile as a formative political experience, from notorious cases such as those of Bolívar or Perón to those of less renowned individuals whose aggregate testimonies build up a collective story of communities of exiles and expatriates. Not surprisingly, the early testimonial literature on the recent wave of political exiles documented the experiences of Brazilians who were forced to leave their country in the aftermath of the 1964 coup d’état (Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1976) and marked a trend that was to persist for the next two decades. The number of such biographies and testimonies has burgeoned in the past generation and includes such insightful works as Oliveira Costa et al. (1980), Gómez (1999), Rollemberg (1999), Ulanovsky (2001), Guelar, Jarach, and Ruiz (2002), Trigo (2003), Bernetti and Giardinelli (2003), and Roca (2005). These biographical accounts and testimonies of exiles and expatriates contribute important building blocks toward a reconstruction of the collective experience of exile. They also point to the ubiquity and profound impact of the phenomenon, which resulted from political exclusion and persecution by the military dictatorships of the 1960s to 1980s. And yet most of these testimonies do not provide a systematic analysis of the role of exile in Latin American politics and societies and do little to explain the recurrence of exile and its transformations over time. At the same time, recent years have witnessed the proliferation of literary analysis and criticism focusing on the universal meaning of the experience of exile, both imposed and self-imposed. This literature is mainly anchored in twentieth-century writings reflecting the pronounced impact of the political repression and military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s (Da Cunha-Giabbai,

Paths of Citizenship and the Legacy of Human Rights Violations: The Cases of Redemocratized Argentina and Uruguay

Through a comparison of redemocratized Argentina and Uruguay, this article shows how distinct historical paths of citizenship affect the strategies and practices enacted in different political communities. The analysis focuses on the societal confrontation with the legacy of human rights violations as the new democratic governments attempted to balance normative principles with political contingencies. Embedded in their particular paths of citizenship, both societies adopted different strategies of post-dictatorial justice and reconciliation, with Argentina achieving a tenuous institutional resolution of this confrontation, while Uruguay achieved a shared resolution, bolstered by popular mobilization and debate, which reinforced the component of civility in its collective identity.