Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador

ISBN-13: 9780521788878 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 274 str.

Elisabeth Jean Wood

Opis

The recent replacement of authoritarian rule by democracy in both South Africa and El Salvador poses a puzzle: why did the powerful, anti-democratic elites of these countries abandon death squads, apartheid, and the other tools of political repression and take a chance on democracy? Forging Democracy From Below shows how popular mobilization--in El Salvador an effective guerilla army supported by peasant collaboration and in South Africa a powerful alliance of labor unions and poor urban dwellers--forced the elite to the bargaining table, and why a durable settlement and democratic government were the result.

Recenzje

"Wood shares with us the voices and experiences of Salvadorans who, most extraordinarily, were interviewed in large numbers over many years and with amazing diligence and intensity by the author, despite their contemporary involvements in a hideously violent civil war. Particularly notable is her careful, even meticulous, discussion of the problems of establishing "real" memories in such a setting. She is also good, very good, at dissecting debates about collective action theories and theories of revolution. And the discussions about the social import of mapmaking are just flat out lovely, and feel so very human, which is (alas) not something you can say very often about a work of sophisticated social science. While her own discipline is political science, she draws on and herself surely enriches the fields of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and Latin American studies writ large." Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Georgetown University

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. From civil war to democracy: improbable transitions in oligarchic societies; Part I. El Salvador's Path to Democracy: 2. From conservative modernization to civil war; 3. The structural foundation of a pact: the transformation of elite interests; 4. Negotiating a democratic transition to end civil war; Part II. From Racial Oligarchy to Pluralist Democracy in South Africa: 5. Apartheid, conservative modernization, and resistance; 6. The challenge to elite economic interests; 7. From recalcitrance to compromise; Conclusion; 8. The insurgent path to democracy in oligarchic societies; Epilogue: the legacy of democracy forged from below.