This book is a two-fer. You get both a history of Haiti, its revolution, and the subsequent attempts by France and the US to keep it impoverished AND an absolutely crazy story about how US forces kidnapped Jean-Betrand Aristide and dropped him in the Central African Republic (which is not to say that it's untrue.) I'll hit the highlights of each element in turn.
Haiti has the distinction of being the only country in the Americas founded by a slave revolt. Led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the revolt successfully ejected their French oppressors in an incredibly costly campaign that claimed the lives of 150,000 of the initial population of 465,000 slaves. (11) Robinson suggests that this success is based on the unusually harsh conditions of French enslavement, the African military experience of many slaves, and the genius of their leadership. (12-14) Unable to successfully assert their ownership over Haiti or its residents, France settled for economic marginalization, and levied an embargo "strengthened by a further demand from France for financial reparations of roughly $21 billion (2004 dollars) as compensation from the newly freed slaves for denying France the further benefit of owning them." (20) This levy had an extraordinary impact on Haiti's development:
" As late as 1915, 111 years after the successful slave revolt, some 80 percent of the Haitian government's resources were being paid out in debt service to French and American banks on loans that had been made to enable Haiti to pay reparations to France.
In 1922, seven years into a nineteen-year American military occupation of Haiti that resulted in 15,000 Haitian deaths, the United States imposed a $16 million dollar loan on the Haitian government to pay off its "debt" to France.
The American loan was finally paid off in 1947. Haiti was left virtually bankrupt, its workforce in desperate straits.
The Haitian economy has never recovered from the financial havoc France (and America) wreaked upon it, during and after slavery." (22)
This continued assault on the Haitian revolution also had a sharp effect on Haitian racial politics, where a light-skinned urban elite controlled and exploited the darker-skinned rural population for their own benefit. (40-42)
It is in this milieu that Aristide emerged as a democratically-elected leader that replaced a series of exploitative, violent dictators. Aristide, himself a villager, attempted to refocus Haitian public policy on the advancement of the rural population (and ended the practice of stamping "rural" on the birth certificates of the peasantry). This did not make him especially popular with the elites, who conspired to remove him.
This is the second part of the book, which gets absolutely crazy. Apparently, rebels trained in the Dominican Republic and armed with American weaponry made a series of assaults on Haitian government facilities. These culminated in a campaign in which a group of a couple hundred rebels moved through small towns shooting up police stations and releasing prisoners. Then, before they entered the capital, Aristide disappeared and ended up in Africa.
The author is a friend of Aristide's, and asserts that Aristide had no plans to leave the country -- in fact, quite the opposite, immediately before his departure, Aristide had scheduled radio interviews with Tavis Smiley for the next day and told friends that he absolutely intended to stay in Port au Prince. According to Aristide, his wife, and their personal pilot (a former US serviceman and Vietnam veteran), a group of white men with beards and snazzy firearms showed up at the Presidential palace in SUVs and told them it was time to go. They were then kept in the dark about their destination and flown from place to place until they ended up in CAR, where the author, Rep. Barbara Boxer (CA), and two journalists negotiated their release to exile in Jamaica and, eventually, South Africa.
Overall, the historical and sociological analysis are extremely interesting. The links between national debt, military occupation, and neo-colonialism are especially relevant in light of Bill Cooke's critique of the World Bank. The latter part, about the kidnapping, is written in a very breathless fashion, and discussions of Aristide read like panegyrics. However, this chain of events was taken seriously enough by Chris Dodd (Conneticut) that he launched investigations into where the guerrillas arms and training came from, and, in the Cheney era it is certainly not outside the realm of believability that the US would brazenly kidnap a world leader.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Wood, Elisabeth Jean. 2000. Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador.
At first blush, comparing El Salvador and South Africa would seem like an odd thing to do. After all, in both cases there were contemporaneous insurgencies that would seem to provide a better basis for a comparative study. However, Wood makes a compelling argument in this work, which is that in both cases the conflict resulted in a negotiated democratic settlement driven by regime economic elites reassessing their positions in the conflict and the value of a labor-coercive oligarchical political structure. In El Salvador, this change was driven by a restructuring of the economy away from agricultural export to service and manufacturing. In South Africa, this was driven by both capital flight and sanctions, but also by a transition from low-wage, low-skill, labor intensive modes of production to high-wage, high-skill, labor efficient modes of production. In these new economic realities, the disruption caused by insurgent mobilization severely hampered the profitability of elite enterprises, and thus a split in the regime coalition emerged between political hardliners and economic accomodationists. In both cases this was demonstrated by a shift from reactionary leaders (Botha, d'Aubisson) to elite-friendly negotiators (deKlerk, Cristiani). And even though the insurgent organizations used very different tactics (FMLN was military dominant, ANC relied on labor unrest and 'ungovernability') both cases resulted in a settlement that met insurgent political demands while securing the financial positions of economic elites (limiting Salvadoran land reform and rejecting South African nationalization of industry). So, in the cases under scrutiny, the model works.
The catch is that these cases had some fairly unique attributes, which Wood acknowledges. First, the economy was able to restructure and allow the emergence of new elites. Second, the resources in question were divisible in a way that other identity struggles may not be. Third, the regime and the insurgents were economically integrated, so that recalcitrance by either side would represent a significant blow to the other. Thus, before this theory can be applied, some careful analysis of the relationship between the combatants and their motivation need to be undertaken.
The catch is that these cases had some fairly unique attributes, which Wood acknowledges. First, the economy was able to restructure and allow the emergence of new elites. Second, the resources in question were divisible in a way that other identity struggles may not be. Third, the regime and the insurgents were economically integrated, so that recalcitrance by either side would represent a significant blow to the other. Thus, before this theory can be applied, some careful analysis of the relationship between the combatants and their motivation need to be undertaken.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Wickham-Crowley, Timothy P. 1992. Guerrillas & Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956.
This book is a work of comparative sociology that postulates a theory about why some 20th century Latin American insurgencies succeeded and others failed. It does this by analyzing the set of insurgencies in two waves: the first being the Cuban-inspired focos that took place between 1956 and 1970 and the second being the post-foco movements that took place between 1970 and 1990. Wickham-Crowley codes the entire set of cases (312), but goes into detailed explanations of a smaller subset. In the first wave, he compares Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Peru and Venezuala. In the second, he compares Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, and Colombia. The cases are all compared using a standard set of variables: Peasant Support, Guerrilla Military Strength, Patrimonial Praetorian Regime, Loss of US Support, and Social Revolution, which are further broken down and explored in the text.
The result of his analysis is that "revolutionaries came to power in Latin America from 1956 to 1990 only when a rural-based guerrilla movement secured strong peasant support in the countryside and achieved substantial levels of military strength; if that movement also faced a patrimonial praetorian regime (a.k.a. mafiacracy), then it was structurally pressured to seek, and succeeded in securing a cross-class alliance against the patrimonial dictator who, lacking the social bases of support to resist such an alliance, in the end fell to a national resistance; under such conditions the United States tended to withdraw support from the dictatorship because of the symbolic and social pressures exerted by the constitutionalist and electoral symbols under which the revolutionaries and their more moderate allies united." (320)
Wickham-Crowley also finds there are three variants for failed insurgencies: "In variant A, the guerrillas did indeed secure substantial peasant support in the countryside, but popular support alone was not enough to carry them to victory. They faced an unweakened form of political regime -- either an electoral democracy or a collective military dictatorship -- and failed in their attempt. Military strength is irrelevant, and US support for the regime simply falls out of the analysis and becomes irrelevant to the outcome. Why? Because some of these regimes retained US support, while some lost it, yet all of them defeated or at least have stood off the insurgents." (322)
"In variant B, the guerrillas usually assayed attempts against stronger regimes supported by US backing and failed. Peasant support was absent in every one of these cases, either because the peasantry was unwilling to do so, or because no revolutionary movement seeking such support made an appearance. Guerrillas here also lacked substantial military might, in any event. The cases for this variant where guerrilla movements were present included Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, and various lesser focos of the 1960s, and Brazil and Mexico in the 1970s." (322)
"Variant C is a most interesting case, for it contains every case of a patrimonial praetorian regime that did not fall to revolution: Nicaragua (1958-1963), Haiti, Paraguay (twice), and Panama under Manuel Noriega. In the absence of a strong guerrilla movement (either absent or weakly supported guerrillas), those regimes did not succumb to revolution, and US support for the regime once again becomes irrelevant to the outcome." (322-323).
While the conclusions are compelling, it is the work on each of the variables that comprises the bulk of the book. And that can get mind-numbing in a hurry, but fortunately Wickham-Crowley has a penchant for the use of handy explanatory charts. So for peasant support check out pg. 261, for Regime Weaknesses look at pg. 279, and for levels of US support look at pg. 85.
The result of his analysis is that "revolutionaries came to power in Latin America from 1956 to 1990 only when a rural-based guerrilla movement secured strong peasant support in the countryside and achieved substantial levels of military strength; if that movement also faced a patrimonial praetorian regime (a.k.a. mafiacracy), then it was structurally pressured to seek, and succeeded in securing a cross-class alliance against the patrimonial dictator who, lacking the social bases of support to resist such an alliance, in the end fell to a national resistance; under such conditions the United States tended to withdraw support from the dictatorship because of the symbolic and social pressures exerted by the constitutionalist and electoral symbols under which the revolutionaries and their more moderate allies united." (320)
Wickham-Crowley also finds there are three variants for failed insurgencies: "In variant A, the guerrillas did indeed secure substantial peasant support in the countryside, but popular support alone was not enough to carry them to victory. They faced an unweakened form of political regime -- either an electoral democracy or a collective military dictatorship -- and failed in their attempt. Military strength is irrelevant, and US support for the regime simply falls out of the analysis and becomes irrelevant to the outcome. Why? Because some of these regimes retained US support, while some lost it, yet all of them defeated or at least have stood off the insurgents." (322)
"In variant B, the guerrillas usually assayed attempts against stronger regimes supported by US backing and failed. Peasant support was absent in every one of these cases, either because the peasantry was unwilling to do so, or because no revolutionary movement seeking such support made an appearance. Guerrillas here also lacked substantial military might, in any event. The cases for this variant where guerrilla movements were present included Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, and various lesser focos of the 1960s, and Brazil and Mexico in the 1970s." (322)
"Variant C is a most interesting case, for it contains every case of a patrimonial praetorian regime that did not fall to revolution: Nicaragua (1958-1963), Haiti, Paraguay (twice), and Panama under Manuel Noriega. In the absence of a strong guerrilla movement (either absent or weakly supported guerrillas), those regimes did not succumb to revolution, and US support for the regime once again becomes irrelevant to the outcome." (322-323).
While the conclusions are compelling, it is the work on each of the variables that comprises the bulk of the book. And that can get mind-numbing in a hurry, but fortunately Wickham-Crowley has a penchant for the use of handy explanatory charts. So for peasant support check out pg. 261, for Regime Weaknesses look at pg. 279, and for levels of US support look at pg. 85.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge University Press: New York.
lThis book is the product of a Doctoral project that blossomed into 10 years of sustained interest in the dynamics of violence in civil wars. As such, it can be extraordinarily technical and advances its argument in painstaking details, with a slew of examples provided for every point. However, the argument itself is quite interesting, and so is worth knowing and thinking about. The detailed summary of the argument appears on pages 11-14, so this will be abbreviated. Kalyvas begins by demonstrating the extremely high level of violence in civil wars, esp. for the civilian population. Multiple narratives have been developed for this phenomenon -- civil wars are like diseases or forces of nature (they erupt, for example) that reveal the true Hobbesian face of humanity. Or, alternatively, civil wars are an expression of a total political polarization of a society that subsumes all other differences and pits two sides against each other in a battle of annihilation. Or perhaps civil wars are incredibly violent because, in many cases, the challenge faced by the combatants is not how to destroy their enemies, but how to go about finding them in the first place. It is this last explanation that feels most plausible to Kalyvas, and it's where he builds his theory.
If the real difficulty in an insurgency is finding the enemy and its supporters, then both sides have a couple of options. They can use selective violence to kill or capture the other side's informants, collaborators, militias, and leadership. But this requires a robust intelligence network that provides inputs on who to target. Alternatively, they can employ indiscriminate violence, which virtually always fails because it only drives people to the other camp or causes them to suffer mutely (if there is no way to avoid the violence by, for instance, becoming an informer, then it doesn't make sense to incur the costs of doing so to no benefit.) So selective violence is the way to go, and most combatants generally come about to this approach. (It should be noted here that Kalyvas excludes genocide and ethnic cleansing from his model, because the complete destruction and NOT subjugation of a population is the goal in that case.)
Unfortunately, selective violence is very hard to pull off well, as it requires a lot of information, which in turn requires the freedom of movement or control required to gather that information. In areas completely controlled by one side, the level of violence is rather low, because identifying and eliminating enemy elements is much easier. However, as an area becomes contested, the level of violence spikes, because the two sides are engaged in a cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal aimed at the destruction of informer networks and the cooperation of the population. However, as the two sides reach parity, the level of violence against civilians decreases, as both sides are unwilling to alienate the population (and thus potentially lose the area) and the informer networks are mutually deterred.
That analysis adopts a pretty standard model for COIN -- there are actors, there is the population, the actors try to influence the population, and whoever can achieve both popular legitimacy and military supremacy wins. Where Kalyvas gets interesting is when he retells this story from the perspective of the individual non-combatant living in a civil war. Running against mythology, Kalyvas asserts that the overriding concern for each member of the population is to stay alive, and demonstrates the point by noting that control of the population militarily is an excellent indicator of its cooperativeness from a mind-bogglingly diverse set of locales. Because control and cooperation are related, he is then able to split the conflict into 5 levels of control (insurgent controlled, insurgent contested, contested, incumbent contested, incumbent controlled) and describe the decision-making procedures in each one.
What he finds is that rational actors in contested zones will use the combatants to settle local grievances and engage in reprisals against one another in a manner demonstrated by the two block quotes below.
Intimacy: "... intimate violence in civil war is, as I suggested, often related to interpersonal and local disputes (it is "right under our feet, so close to us ...") rather than impersonal abstract hatred. Yet this statement should be interpreted less as a mere endorsement of the Hobbesian view of human nature as fundamentally violent under conditions of insecurity, and more as an observation about the power of the practice of denunciation as spurred by interpersonal competition. For intimate violence signals less a process of politicization of individual life and more a process of pervasive privitization of politics; less a transgression of social ties and more their full, though pervasive, expression. The evidence of malicious denunciation in symmetric and concentrated environments further undermines the view of intimate violence as the exclusive outcome of deep divisions -- though such violence can eventually transform interpersonal hatreds into impersonal ones." (362-363)
Alliance: "Alliance entails a process of convergence of interests via a transaction between supralocal and local actors, whereby the former supply the latter with external muscle, thus allowing them to win decisive advantage over local rivals; in exchange, supralocal actors are able to tap into local networks and generate mobilization. A great deal of action in civil war is, therefore, simultaneously decentralized and linked to the wider conflict. Thus civil war is (also) a process that connects the collective actors' quest for power and the local actors' quest for local advantage. Put otherwise, violence can be a selective benefit that produces local mobilization via alliance." (383)
He then applies the theoretical model to an incredibly detailed micro-analysis of a specific area of Greece and catalogs the local experience with violence during the Greek Civil War using detailed judicial archives, personal interviews, and military records. It's really quite amazing, and, of course, the findings validate the theory. In fact, looking at the model provides a really useful way to approach aggregation of local inputs in COIN, and should be thought about carefully, as many theories sound very good on paper, but are difficult, if not impossible, to put into practice.
SEE ALSO: Wickham-Crowley (1992) pg. 260-261, for a how this process proceeded in Latin American revolution/counter-revolutionary contexts.
If the real difficulty in an insurgency is finding the enemy and its supporters, then both sides have a couple of options. They can use selective violence to kill or capture the other side's informants, collaborators, militias, and leadership. But this requires a robust intelligence network that provides inputs on who to target. Alternatively, they can employ indiscriminate violence, which virtually always fails because it only drives people to the other camp or causes them to suffer mutely (if there is no way to avoid the violence by, for instance, becoming an informer, then it doesn't make sense to incur the costs of doing so to no benefit.) So selective violence is the way to go, and most combatants generally come about to this approach. (It should be noted here that Kalyvas excludes genocide and ethnic cleansing from his model, because the complete destruction and NOT subjugation of a population is the goal in that case.)
Unfortunately, selective violence is very hard to pull off well, as it requires a lot of information, which in turn requires the freedom of movement or control required to gather that information. In areas completely controlled by one side, the level of violence is rather low, because identifying and eliminating enemy elements is much easier. However, as an area becomes contested, the level of violence spikes, because the two sides are engaged in a cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal aimed at the destruction of informer networks and the cooperation of the population. However, as the two sides reach parity, the level of violence against civilians decreases, as both sides are unwilling to alienate the population (and thus potentially lose the area) and the informer networks are mutually deterred.
That analysis adopts a pretty standard model for COIN -- there are actors, there is the population, the actors try to influence the population, and whoever can achieve both popular legitimacy and military supremacy wins. Where Kalyvas gets interesting is when he retells this story from the perspective of the individual non-combatant living in a civil war. Running against mythology, Kalyvas asserts that the overriding concern for each member of the population is to stay alive, and demonstrates the point by noting that control of the population militarily is an excellent indicator of its cooperativeness from a mind-bogglingly diverse set of locales. Because control and cooperation are related, he is then able to split the conflict into 5 levels of control (insurgent controlled, insurgent contested, contested, incumbent contested, incumbent controlled) and describe the decision-making procedures in each one.
What he finds is that rational actors in contested zones will use the combatants to settle local grievances and engage in reprisals against one another in a manner demonstrated by the two block quotes below.
Intimacy: "... intimate violence in civil war is, as I suggested, often related to interpersonal and local disputes (it is "right under our feet, so close to us ...") rather than impersonal abstract hatred. Yet this statement should be interpreted less as a mere endorsement of the Hobbesian view of human nature as fundamentally violent under conditions of insecurity, and more as an observation about the power of the practice of denunciation as spurred by interpersonal competition. For intimate violence signals less a process of politicization of individual life and more a process of pervasive privitization of politics; less a transgression of social ties and more their full, though pervasive, expression. The evidence of malicious denunciation in symmetric and concentrated environments further undermines the view of intimate violence as the exclusive outcome of deep divisions -- though such violence can eventually transform interpersonal hatreds into impersonal ones." (362-363)
Alliance: "Alliance entails a process of convergence of interests via a transaction between supralocal and local actors, whereby the former supply the latter with external muscle, thus allowing them to win decisive advantage over local rivals; in exchange, supralocal actors are able to tap into local networks and generate mobilization. A great deal of action in civil war is, therefore, simultaneously decentralized and linked to the wider conflict. Thus civil war is (also) a process that connects the collective actors' quest for power and the local actors' quest for local advantage. Put otherwise, violence can be a selective benefit that produces local mobilization via alliance." (383)
He then applies the theoretical model to an incredibly detailed micro-analysis of a specific area of Greece and catalogs the local experience with violence during the Greek Civil War using detailed judicial archives, personal interviews, and military records. It's really quite amazing, and, of course, the findings validate the theory. In fact, looking at the model provides a really useful way to approach aggregation of local inputs in COIN, and should be thought about carefully, as many theories sound very good on paper, but are difficult, if not impossible, to put into practice.
SEE ALSO: Wickham-Crowley (1992) pg. 260-261, for a how this process proceeded in Latin American revolution/counter-revolutionary contexts.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Hickey, Samuel and Giles Mohan, eds. 2004. Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation? Zed Books: London.
This book is an edited volume that replies to Participation: The New Tyranny? by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari. It is not as strong as the work it responds to, but does take the tyranny critique seriously and looks for ways to undertake a democratic, locally-designed development plan.
"The collection is divided into six sections, the first of which reviews how contemporary debates and thematic challenges surrounding debates over how participation might be (re)established as a transformative approach to development, while also offering a scepitcal note on the dangers of continuing with any participatory project. The second section seeks to rethink the concept of participation through theoretical engagement with space, political capabilities and citizenship. The next three sections analyze case studies of different actors and processes engaged in participation. Section III continues the theoretical debates over participation in relation to the links between participation and popular agency as embedded practice, and focuses on the complexities of 'indigenous' decision-making. Part IV focuses on civil society and the local state and the synergies and conflicts between them while Part V examines participatory initiatives by international development donors. The final section comprises short reflections by key commenters based both on a selection of chapters from the collection and wider debates on participation.
As will become clear, an underlying theme in all the contributions is that 'politics matters' within international development. We believe, and most contributors confirm, that understanding the ways in which participation relates to existing power structures and political systems provides the basis for moving towards a more transformatory approach to development; one which is rooted in the exercise of broadly defined citizenship." (4-5)
Cause this book didn't particularly flip my skirt, I'm going to provide the bibliographic data for the essays, and then follow with an annotation of the ones I liked.
Section 1: From tyranny to transformation?
Hickey, Sam and Giles Mohan. "Towards participation as transformation: critical themes and challenges."
Gaventa, John. "Towards participatory governance: assessing the transformative possibilities."
Cooke, Bill. "Rules of thumb for participatory change agents."
Section 2: Rethinking participation
Mohan, Giles and Sam Hickey. "Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: critical modernism and citizenship."
Cornwall, Andrea. "Spaces for transformation? reflections on issues of power and difference in participation in development."
Williams, Glyn. "Towards a repoliticization of participatory development: political capabilities and spaces of empowerment."
Section 3: Participation as popular agency: reconnecting with underlying processes of development.
Vincent, Susan. "Participation, resistance and problems with the 'local' in Peru: towards a new political contract?"
Masaki, Katsuhiko. "The 'transformative' unfolding of 'tyrannical' participation: the corvee tradition and ongoing local politics in Western Nepal."
Henry, Leroi. "Morality, citizenship and participatory development in an indigenous development association: the case of the GPSDO and the Sebat Bet Gurage of Ethopia."
Section Four: Realizing transformative participation in practice: state and civil responses.
Hickey, Sam and Giles Mohan. "Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: insights from political action and practice."
Mitlin, Diana. "Securing voice and transforming practice in local government: the role of federating in grassroots development."
Florisbello, Glauco Regis and Irene Guijt. "Participatory municipal development plans in Brazil: divergent partners constructing common futures."
Kelly, Ute. "Confrontations with power: moving beyond 'the tyranny of safety' in participation."
Waddington, Mark and Giles Mohan. "Failing forward: going beyond PRA and imposed forms of participation."
Section 5: Donors and participation: caught between tyranny and transformation.
Brown, David. "Participation in poverty reduction strategies: democracy strengthened or democracy undermined?"
Holland, Jeremy, Mary Ann Brocklesby, and Charles Abugre. "Beyond the technical fix? participation in donor approaches to rights-based development."
Section 6: Broader perspectives on 'from tyranny to transformation'
Cleaver, Francis. "The social embeddedness of agency and decision-making."
Bebbington, Anthony. "Theorizing participation and institutional change: ethnography and political economy."
So without question, my favorite article in this collection is Bill Cooke's. He remains deeply opposed to "participatory" methods, and sets out rules that do more to highlight the deficiencies of the method than they do to provide a roadmap for effective engagments (they entail, for instance, that international workers work at local rates, which, assuming the international workers are going to return to their country of origin is a recipe that guarantees noone would ever become a participatory developer, as doing so would be a recipe for pauperization later in life. But his first rule is classic, and is reproduced here in it's entirety (emphasis added by me).
"Rule I: Don't work for the World Bank.
Instrumentally, credible change agents are prinicipled change agents; and principled change agents know who they won't work for, and why. If not the Bank, then who? According to Schein, inventor of the idea of process consultation: 'any time we help someone we are in effect allying ourselves with the goals and values they represent. We cannot later abdicate responsibility for the help we have provided if that turns out to have had bad effects on other groups (Schein 1978a:127).
What follows is to state the obvious. Greater impact on people's empowerment -- in terms of, say, their right to life through healthcare, water and education -- is made by decisions taken by the Bank and the IMF on debt repayment than can be made by an infinity of face-to-face participatory events which have no power over debt. And, bluntly, one of the reasons why that debt accumulated was through loans to corrupt and criminal regimes kept in power to sustain a particular world order. Loans were also made by private sector banks to private sector organizations in the Third World. When these creditors defaulted, Third World governments were forced to take the debts on. In an otherwise neo-liberalizing world, private sector debt is nationalized and its repayment extorted from individual, poor, taxpayers (e.g. Chossudovsky 1997).
It is participatory development's institutional groupthink (Cooke 2001) that requires the restatement of these basic facts so baldly. Organizations such as the Bretton Woods Project (2003- ) produce rigorously researched account of the Bank's dysfunctional behavior, and Griffiths (2003) produces an insider accounts of its ideological infliction of famine; and the opposition of worldwide anti-globalization movements is widely reported. Yet the participation establishment seems to have no qualms (to put it mildly) and, at least in some cases, has supported the Bank's appropriation of participatory discourse and methods. More basic facts: the World Bank is an organization that sees more neo-liberalism as the remedy for the problems it has visited on the world's poor; and, to the point here, it uses participatory methodolgies and practitioners to enforce that agenda (see Brown, this volume). Those participatory practitioners are taking an ideological stance. And, to be fair, there are some practitioners who know this, and will not work for or with Bank.
Otherwise, though, why do practitioners who might be assumed to be liberal rather than neo-liberal continue to work for the Bank material interest aside (see Rule V)? Publicly espoused justifications are often along the lines that it is possible to make a difference through a specific Bank project, or more generally that there is the space for alternatives within the Bank, which is not a homogenous monolith.
A retort to the first of these is that given all the participatory interventions which might be made, why is so much effort dedicated to the Bank's. Moreover, it is breathtaking vanity for participatory practitioners to suggest that they can succeed in changing the Bank from within when others better qualified have not been able to do so, from Nobel prize-winning Joseph Stiglitz through to World Development Report author (or not) Ravi Kanbur (Pincus and Winters 2002). Perhaps, rather, participatory practitioners are allowed through the door precisely because there is no danger of them challenging neo-liberal hegemony, or, worse, because they sustain it.
The point about the Bank not being a monolith works the other way. There is enough in political and organizational theories to show that institutions present different faces to different people the better to incorporate them, to legitimize themselves in society, and to buy critics off (of which more in Rule II). Participatory development also does a more directly neo-liberalizing job for the Bank. A study by the World Development Movement (Marshall and Woodroffe 2001) of country Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) found that, pro-poor rhetoric aside, the actual changes they proposed, in every country, were neo-liberal prescriptions identical with both previously discredited Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), and with one another. This monolithic homogeneity would be logically surprising if the clams for participation in their production held true, suggesting that participating poor people from countries as diverse as Ghana, Bolivia and Cambodia all chose privitization and user fees, but not redistribution, as the solution to their problems.
Perhaps participator practitioners are particularly prone to this form of vanity because of what controlling participatory processes does to their self-image. Studies of some of the earliest versions of organized participatory face-to-face groups, known as T(raining)-groups, from the 1950s onwards have shown how they generate euphoria in both participants and facilitates, so the latter sense they have in their gift some magical power capable of engendering profound personal transformation (Kleiner 1996). Addition to the sense of well-being that they are apparently able to create can lead practitioners to commit to the cause which permits their participatory practice, oblivious to what that cause it, its consequences, or to the fact that what they are doing is simply a matter of social-psychological technique." (43-45)
In Rule 2 "Remember: co-option, co-option, co-option", Cooke writes:
"Sadly, there is yet a third form of co-optation -- of radical participation by the orthodoxy (symbolized by even the World Bank [2003b] claiming to host an 'Empowerment Community of Practice') - which is perhaps the most problematic for the purposes of this book. In the work of participatory theoriest -- Friere (1972) par excellence -- for whom participation is about changing consciousness, emancipation rather than just empowerment has been around for some time. However, there is a longstanding analysis in organization studies which identifies a dynamic in which such radical ideas are co-opted, reduced to technique, and applied for non-emancipatory end. Ironically, the metaphorical term used to describe this process is 'colonization' (Prasad 2003). A specific example is the work of Saul Alinsky (Cooke 1998). Alinsky's model of participatory grassroots organizing, discussed in Reveille for Radicals (1948), was part of a programme which included bringing the means of production into the common ownership, and critiqued the US labour movement for racist collusion with monopoly capital. But his method (along with that of others) was appropriated, neutralized and transformed by Lippitt et al. (1958), in their standard work which produced a generic model of change interventions and, in passing, brought the term 'change agent' to prominence." (46-47)
This essay dovetails nicely with Duffield's "Global Governance and the New Wars", which suggests that development continually reinvents itself in order to obscure the underlying dynamics of powerful states maintaining their hegemony. Thus, "failure" is not a structural dynamic, but is just a problem of method.
To their credit, most of the authors in this volume "perceive inequality as a form of asymmetric conflict: a conflict that is located at the structural rather than the interpersonal level, and a conflict in which power is unevenly distributed." (213) And, given that political recognition, propose various radical schemes to challenge those power arrangments and build a more empowered citizen. However, as Cooke observes, the method of doing that called "participation" has been co-opted already, and perhaps the only way to prevent disempowering institutions from using it as cover is to begin the cycle anew and develop a new vocabulary for collective consciousness raising.
"The collection is divided into six sections, the first of which reviews how contemporary debates and thematic challenges surrounding debates over how participation might be (re)established as a transformative approach to development, while also offering a scepitcal note on the dangers of continuing with any participatory project. The second section seeks to rethink the concept of participation through theoretical engagement with space, political capabilities and citizenship. The next three sections analyze case studies of different actors and processes engaged in participation. Section III continues the theoretical debates over participation in relation to the links between participation and popular agency as embedded practice, and focuses on the complexities of 'indigenous' decision-making. Part IV focuses on civil society and the local state and the synergies and conflicts between them while Part V examines participatory initiatives by international development donors. The final section comprises short reflections by key commenters based both on a selection of chapters from the collection and wider debates on participation.
As will become clear, an underlying theme in all the contributions is that 'politics matters' within international development. We believe, and most contributors confirm, that understanding the ways in which participation relates to existing power structures and political systems provides the basis for moving towards a more transformatory approach to development; one which is rooted in the exercise of broadly defined citizenship." (4-5)
Cause this book didn't particularly flip my skirt, I'm going to provide the bibliographic data for the essays, and then follow with an annotation of the ones I liked.
Section 1: From tyranny to transformation?
Hickey, Sam and Giles Mohan. "Towards participation as transformation: critical themes and challenges."
Gaventa, John. "Towards participatory governance: assessing the transformative possibilities."
Cooke, Bill. "Rules of thumb for participatory change agents."
Section 2: Rethinking participation
Mohan, Giles and Sam Hickey. "Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: critical modernism and citizenship."
Cornwall, Andrea. "Spaces for transformation? reflections on issues of power and difference in participation in development."
Williams, Glyn. "Towards a repoliticization of participatory development: political capabilities and spaces of empowerment."
Section 3: Participation as popular agency: reconnecting with underlying processes of development.
Vincent, Susan. "Participation, resistance and problems with the 'local' in Peru: towards a new political contract?"
Masaki, Katsuhiko. "The 'transformative' unfolding of 'tyrannical' participation: the corvee tradition and ongoing local politics in Western Nepal."
Henry, Leroi. "Morality, citizenship and participatory development in an indigenous development association: the case of the GPSDO and the Sebat Bet Gurage of Ethopia."
Section Four: Realizing transformative participation in practice: state and civil responses.
Hickey, Sam and Giles Mohan. "Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: insights from political action and practice."
Mitlin, Diana. "Securing voice and transforming practice in local government: the role of federating in grassroots development."
Florisbello, Glauco Regis and Irene Guijt. "Participatory municipal development plans in Brazil: divergent partners constructing common futures."
Kelly, Ute. "Confrontations with power: moving beyond 'the tyranny of safety' in participation."
Waddington, Mark and Giles Mohan. "Failing forward: going beyond PRA and imposed forms of participation."
Section 5: Donors and participation: caught between tyranny and transformation.
Brown, David. "Participation in poverty reduction strategies: democracy strengthened or democracy undermined?"
Holland, Jeremy, Mary Ann Brocklesby, and Charles Abugre. "Beyond the technical fix? participation in donor approaches to rights-based development."
Section 6: Broader perspectives on 'from tyranny to transformation'
Cleaver, Francis. "The social embeddedness of agency and decision-making."
Bebbington, Anthony. "Theorizing participation and institutional change: ethnography and political economy."
So without question, my favorite article in this collection is Bill Cooke's. He remains deeply opposed to "participatory" methods, and sets out rules that do more to highlight the deficiencies of the method than they do to provide a roadmap for effective engagments (they entail, for instance, that international workers work at local rates, which, assuming the international workers are going to return to their country of origin is a recipe that guarantees noone would ever become a participatory developer, as doing so would be a recipe for pauperization later in life. But his first rule is classic, and is reproduced here in it's entirety (emphasis added by me).
"Rule I: Don't work for the World Bank.
Instrumentally, credible change agents are prinicipled change agents; and principled change agents know who they won't work for, and why. If not the Bank, then who? According to Schein, inventor of the idea of process consultation: 'any time we help someone we are in effect allying ourselves with the goals and values they represent. We cannot later abdicate responsibility for the help we have provided if that turns out to have had bad effects on other groups (Schein 1978a:127).
What follows is to state the obvious. Greater impact on people's empowerment -- in terms of, say, their right to life through healthcare, water and education -- is made by decisions taken by the Bank and the IMF on debt repayment than can be made by an infinity of face-to-face participatory events which have no power over debt. And, bluntly, one of the reasons why that debt accumulated was through loans to corrupt and criminal regimes kept in power to sustain a particular world order. Loans were also made by private sector banks to private sector organizations in the Third World. When these creditors defaulted, Third World governments were forced to take the debts on. In an otherwise neo-liberalizing world, private sector debt is nationalized and its repayment extorted from individual, poor, taxpayers (e.g. Chossudovsky 1997).
It is participatory development's institutional groupthink (Cooke 2001) that requires the restatement of these basic facts so baldly. Organizations such as the Bretton Woods Project (2003- ) produce rigorously researched account of the Bank's dysfunctional behavior, and Griffiths (2003) produces an insider accounts of its ideological infliction of famine; and the opposition of worldwide anti-globalization movements is widely reported. Yet the participation establishment seems to have no qualms (to put it mildly) and, at least in some cases, has supported the Bank's appropriation of participatory discourse and methods. More basic facts: the World Bank is an organization that sees more neo-liberalism as the remedy for the problems it has visited on the world's poor; and, to the point here, it uses participatory methodolgies and practitioners to enforce that agenda (see Brown, this volume). Those participatory practitioners are taking an ideological stance. And, to be fair, there are some practitioners who know this, and will not work for or with Bank.
Otherwise, though, why do practitioners who might be assumed to be liberal rather than neo-liberal continue to work for the Bank material interest aside (see Rule V)? Publicly espoused justifications are often along the lines that it is possible to make a difference through a specific Bank project, or more generally that there is the space for alternatives within the Bank, which is not a homogenous monolith.
A retort to the first of these is that given all the participatory interventions which might be made, why is so much effort dedicated to the Bank's. Moreover, it is breathtaking vanity for participatory practitioners to suggest that they can succeed in changing the Bank from within when others better qualified have not been able to do so, from Nobel prize-winning Joseph Stiglitz through to World Development Report author (or not) Ravi Kanbur (Pincus and Winters 2002). Perhaps, rather, participatory practitioners are allowed through the door precisely because there is no danger of them challenging neo-liberal hegemony, or, worse, because they sustain it.
The point about the Bank not being a monolith works the other way. There is enough in political and organizational theories to show that institutions present different faces to different people the better to incorporate them, to legitimize themselves in society, and to buy critics off (of which more in Rule II). Participatory development also does a more directly neo-liberalizing job for the Bank. A study by the World Development Movement (Marshall and Woodroffe 2001) of country Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) found that, pro-poor rhetoric aside, the actual changes they proposed, in every country, were neo-liberal prescriptions identical with both previously discredited Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), and with one another. This monolithic homogeneity would be logically surprising if the clams for participation in their production held true, suggesting that participating poor people from countries as diverse as Ghana, Bolivia and Cambodia all chose privitization and user fees, but not redistribution, as the solution to their problems.
Perhaps participator practitioners are particularly prone to this form of vanity because of what controlling participatory processes does to their self-image. Studies of some of the earliest versions of organized participatory face-to-face groups, known as T(raining)-groups, from the 1950s onwards have shown how they generate euphoria in both participants and facilitates, so the latter sense they have in their gift some magical power capable of engendering profound personal transformation (Kleiner 1996). Addition to the sense of well-being that they are apparently able to create can lead practitioners to commit to the cause which permits their participatory practice, oblivious to what that cause it, its consequences, or to the fact that what they are doing is simply a matter of social-psychological technique." (43-45)
In Rule 2 "Remember: co-option, co-option, co-option", Cooke writes:
"Sadly, there is yet a third form of co-optation -- of radical participation by the orthodoxy (symbolized by even the World Bank [2003b] claiming to host an 'Empowerment Community of Practice') - which is perhaps the most problematic for the purposes of this book. In the work of participatory theoriest -- Friere (1972) par excellence -- for whom participation is about changing consciousness, emancipation rather than just empowerment has been around for some time. However, there is a longstanding analysis in organization studies which identifies a dynamic in which such radical ideas are co-opted, reduced to technique, and applied for non-emancipatory end. Ironically, the metaphorical term used to describe this process is 'colonization' (Prasad 2003). A specific example is the work of Saul Alinsky (Cooke 1998). Alinsky's model of participatory grassroots organizing, discussed in Reveille for Radicals (1948), was part of a programme which included bringing the means of production into the common ownership, and critiqued the US labour movement for racist collusion with monopoly capital. But his method (along with that of others) was appropriated, neutralized and transformed by Lippitt et al. (1958), in their standard work which produced a generic model of change interventions and, in passing, brought the term 'change agent' to prominence." (46-47)
This essay dovetails nicely with Duffield's "Global Governance and the New Wars", which suggests that development continually reinvents itself in order to obscure the underlying dynamics of powerful states maintaining their hegemony. Thus, "failure" is not a structural dynamic, but is just a problem of method.
To their credit, most of the authors in this volume "perceive inequality as a form of asymmetric conflict: a conflict that is located at the structural rather than the interpersonal level, and a conflict in which power is unevenly distributed." (213) And, given that political recognition, propose various radical schemes to challenge those power arrangments and build a more empowered citizen. However, as Cooke observes, the method of doing that called "participation" has been co-opted already, and perhaps the only way to prevent disempowering institutions from using it as cover is to begin the cycle anew and develop a new vocabulary for collective consciousness raising.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Cooke, Bill and Uma Kothari, eds. 2001. Participation: The New Tyranny? Zed Books: London.
Participatory development is the new thing in humanitarian and development circles. The idea is that previous development paradigms failed because they imposed solutions on communities that were inappropriate in the local context. To ameliorate that problem, aid workers, World Bank employees, etc, would go to the affected communities and engage in group discussions about the proposed projects and come up with more effective aid interventions. This volume critiques that approach by arguing that participatory methods merely apply a patina of local involvement to what remains an externally driven, top-down planning process.
(Also, for this annotation, I'm just going to crib the Introductory summary of the essays contained in the volume, cause I lack the time/ambition to look at them all again right now.)
Cooke, Bill and Uma Kothari. "The Case for Participation as Tyranny."
"Taken together, these themes (there are other, which readers may identify) point to what for us is the fundamental concern. It becomes clear from a reading of the chapters in this book that the proponents of participatory development have generally been naive about the complexities of power and power relations. This is the case not only 'on the ground' between 'facilitators' and 'participants', between 'participants' and more widely between 'donors' and 'beneficiaries', but also historically and discursively in the construction of what constitutes knowledge and social norms. While analyses of power in participation are not new, what is evident here is that there are multiple and diverse ways in which this power is expressed; furthermore, articulations of power are very often less visible, being as they are embedded in social and cultural practices. Thus this book identifies a more nuanced set of understandings of the workings of power as being necessary, in order to uncover its varied and subtle manifestations in the very discourse of participation.
The genealogies and histories of development in general, and participatory practices in particular, that are found in some of these chapters further explicate how a misunderstanding of power underpins much of the participatory discourse. The identification of the (mis)interpretations of how and where power is expressed within participation compels us to reconsider the notion of empowerment, and the claims to empowerment made by many participatory practitioners. Since an understanding of the concept of 'empowerment' is based on particular realizations of its root concept, 'power', and since this, as some of the chapters in this book argue, has been simplified in the theory and practice of participation, the meanings ascribed to the condition of empowerment and the claims made for its attainment for those who have been marginalized must also be subjected to further scrutiny.
This confirms, for us, that we were right to discuss participation in terms of its tyrannical potential, remembering that tyranny is precisely about the illegitimate and/or unjust uses of power. The question we will not answer here, however, is whether this potential can be overcome. What we do suggest, however, is a starting point for those who might try to redeem it. This is to build a more sophisticated and genuinely reflexive understanding of power and its manifestations and dynamics. Written into this understanding must be a recognition that participatory development does not have a reified existence 'out there', but is constructed by a cadre of development professionals, be they academics, practitioners or policy-makers, whose ability to create or sustain this discourse is indicative of the power they possess. This must be accompanied by an acknowledgment that questions such as 'Whose reality counts?' (Chambers 1997), which suggest that there are contrasting versions of reality, mask the extent to which these development professionals, in their applications of the ideas of participatory development, are actually still engaged in the construction of a particular reality -- one that at root is amenable to, and justifies, their existence and intervention within it.
What we are calling for as a first step, therefore, is a genuine and rigorous reflexivity, one that acknowledges the processes and consequences of these constructions. This means going beyond the evident narrowness (verging on narcissism) of the existing self-acclaimed 'self-critical epistemological awareness' (Chambers 1997: 32) to draw on a deeper and more wide-ranging set of analyses than has hitherto been the case. This book has provided some of these analyses and, we hope, initiated this reflexivity. Ironically, though, authentic reflexivity requires a level of open-mindedness that accepts that participatory development may inevitably be tyrannical, and preparedness to abandon it if this is the case. Thus any meaningful attempt to save participatory development requires a sincere acceptance of the possibility that it should not be saved." (14-15)
Mosse, David. "'People's Knowledge', Participation and Patronage: Operations and Representations in Rural Development"
"David Mosse in Chapter 2 challenges the populist assumption that attention to 'local knowledge' through participatory learning will redefine the relationship between local communities and development organizations. Using project-based illustrations, he shows that 'local knowledge', far from determining planning processes and outcomes, is often structured by them. For example, what in one case was expressed as a 'local need' was actually shaped by local perceptions of what the agency in question could legitimately and realistically be expected to deliver. Indeed, 'participatory planning' may, more accurately, be view as the acquistion and manipulation of a new 'planning knowledge' rather than the incorporation of 'people's knowledge' by projects.
Mosse then shows how participatory ideals are often operationally constrained by institutional contexts that require formal and informal bureaucratic goals to be met. Participation nevertheless remains important as part of a projects as a 'system of representations'. As such, ideas of participation are oriented towards concerns that are external to project locations. There representations do not necessarily speak directly to local practice and provide little by way of guidance on project implementation, but they are important in negotiating relationships with donors, and more widely in underpinning positions withing development policy debates." (8)
Cleaver, Frances. "Institutions, Agency and the Limitations of Participatory Approaches to Development."
"In Chapter 3 Frances Cleaver also makes use of case studies, here in relation to water resource usage. The chapter begins by questioning 'the heroic claims made for development', and by presenting the case for understanding the role of social structure and of individual agency in shaping participation. Participatory development, Cleaver suggests, tends to conflate social structures with institutions, most commonly conceptualized as organizations, not least because such institutions apparently make social structures 'legible'. However, participatory development bureaucracies have preferences for institutional arrangements that may not correspond with those of 'participants'. Problems identified include and espousal of the importance of informal institutions while actual concentration is on the formal; the varying forms of participation that different institutional types require; the questionable assumptions about 'community' upon which participatory institution-building is based; and the tendency towards foundationalism about local communities.
The chapter goes on to consider the inadequacy of participatory approaches' models of individual agency and the links between these and social structures. The argument presented here is that understandings of the motivations of individuals to participate, or not, are vague, and simplistic assumptions are made about the rationality inherent in participating, and the irresponsibility of not doing so. Furthermore, participatory approaches fail to recognize how different, changing and multiple identities of individuals impact upon their choices about whether and how to participate, and overlook the potential links between inclusion in participatory processes and subordination." (8-9)
Hildyard, Nicholas, Pandurang Hedge, Paul Wolvekamp, and Somasekhare Reddy. "Pluralism, Participation and Power: Joint Forest Management in India."
Chapter 4, by [all those people above], examines, in light of the increasing fashion for participatory forest management, conflicts over the meanings of 'participation' and 'forests'. It begins by suggesting that the failure by donors to implement policies on participation is institutionally deep-seated and structural, and that through participatory is institutionally deep-seated and structural, and that through participatory development grassroots organizations are in danger of becoming 'the human software through which investments cn be made with least local opposition'. It then shows that while participatory Joint Forest Management project in which the chapter authors were involved as local activists of Northern-based solidarity groups. The authors conclude by arguing that unless participatory processes take into account the relative bargaining power of so-called stakeholders they are in danger of merely providing opportunities for the more powerful." (9)
Francis, Paul. "Participatory Development at the World Bank: the Primacy of Process."
"In Chapter 5 Paul Francis begins by summarizing the three main approaches to participation employed by the World Bank -- Beneficiary Assessment, Social Analysis, and PRA -- before going on to focus on the last of these. Initially the chapter sets out PRA's methodological and epistemological bases before questioning the relationship between 'the community' and 'the professional', suggesting inter alia that the importance of charismatic specialists, who claim a moral position combined with an inner-directedness and the symbolism of 'reversal', recalls the role of the shaman. Francis suggests that PRA is rite of communion, the performance of which 'enacts an exorcism, of sorts, of the phantoms of "conventional" development practice', and analyses the World Bank Participation Sourcebook as 'part self-improvement manual and part mythical text. At the same time, though, the reductionist simplifications of PRA techniques are noted. Next Francis considers the uptake of participatory approaches at the Bank within the context of the new emphasis on 'the social' in terms of process, consultation and partnership. He argues that underlying structural determinants of well-being are given little attention and that this is reinforced by the individualist nature of PRA, and the absence of any real alternative vision of development leaves it vulnerable to opportunism and co-option." (10)
Hailey, John. "Beyond the Formulaic: Process and Practice in South Asian NGOs."
"In Chapter 6 John Hailey draws on a range of ideas to question the formulaic approaches to participatory decision-making promoted and even imposed by donors and other development actors. These include Hoftstede's work on cross-cultural management, a Foucaldian analysis of power and the discourse of participation, and a recognition of the Cold War uses of community participation. Hailey begins by reviewing recent research into the development and growth of successful South Asian NGOs that suggested that NGO success resulted from the understandings of, and responses to, the needs of the local communities where they worked. However, research showed that this closeness to communities arose not from the application of the well-known formulaic approaches to participation -- indeed, they were conspicuous by their absence. Rather, as case examples in the chapter illustrate, success was achieved by a long-term effort by NGO leaders to build close personal relations with individuals and groups in the communities with which they worked, and with NGO staff. The chapter then offers three explanations for the absence of formulaic approaches to participation. The first is that they have real operational limitations, the second is that they are culturally inappropriate, and the third is that their history and the reality of the practice indicate that they might (legitimately) be seen as a means of imposing external control." (10)
Cooke, Bill. "The Social Psychological Limits of Participation?"
In Chapter 7, Bill Cooke uses four concepts from social psychology (risky shift, the Abilene paradox, groupthink, and coercive persuasion) to demonstrate how individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the presence -- real, imagined or implied -- of others. These concepts suggest that problems can arise as a consequence of the face-to-face interactions that are a defining feature of participatory development. Taken together the four concepts suggest that participatory process can lead people to take, first, collective decisions that are more risky than those they would have taken individually (i.e. risky shift). Second, they can lead to people taking a decision that participants have second-guessed is what everyone else wants, when the opposite is the case (the Abilene paradox). Third, particular dynamics, the symptoms of which include a belief in the inherent morality of what is being done, self-censorship, and the existence of 'mindguards', can lead to evidently wrong decisions, which can be harmful to 'outgroup' members (groupthink). Fourth, the manipulation of group processes can lead to malign changes in ideological beliefs, or consciousness (coercive persuasion). All four challenge participatory development's claims for effectiveness and empowerment, and suggest a disciplinary bias that permits the use of technology on the world's poor without the safeguards the rich would expect." (10-11)
Taylor, Harry. "Insights into Participation from Critical Management and Labour Process Perspectives."
"In Chapter 8 Harry Taylor challenges Robert Chambers' positive spin on the parallels between participatory development and participatory management. Taylor argues that participation in both cases is part of a wider attempt to influence power relations between elite groups and the less powerful -- be they individual project beneficiaries or the employees of organizations in the developing world. He makes his case by first drawing parallels between project beneficiaries and employees within organizations in terms of their relative dependancy and powerlessness. Moving on to consider arguments for participation from mainstream management, he suggests that even on its own terms doubts about its feasibility and desirability exist. From a more critical management perspective he then draw on Foucaldian and labour process critiques, which suggest that participation is always constrained, and hides and at the same time perpetuates certain sets of power relations. Taylore rounds off his chapter by suggesting why there is disillusionment with participation in both development and management arenas, and by speculating on the prospects for 'genuine' participation." (11)
Kothari, Uma. "Power, Knowledge and Social Control in Participatory Development."
"In Chapter 9 Uma Kothari challenges the truth claims made be participatory development. Like Harry Taylor and John Hailey she proposes a Foucauldian approach to the understanding of power, as something which circulates, rather than as something divided between those who have it and those who do not. This latter dichotomous approach typifies participatory development, and leads to practices based in conventional stratifications of power. These serve both to conceal daily oppressions in people's lives that run through every aspect of everyday life and to ensure that participants remain the subject of development surveillance. Although PRA seeks to reveal the realities of everyday life, paradoxically its public nature means that the more participatory it is, the more the power structure of the local community will be masked. The chapter concludes by drawing on the work of Goffman to consider how the ritual practices of PRA actually serve to subvert it, by producing front stage performances that conceal both the 'real' reality of the back stage, and come to be taken for that reality." (11-12)
Mohan, Giles. "Beyond Participation: Strategies for Deeper Empowerment."
"In Chapter 10 Giles Mohan has two major aims. The first is to critique participatory practices, in particular the ways in which local knowledge is supposedly produced as a reversal of 'top-down' approaches. This critique is made using the ideas associated with post-colonial studies and argues that a subtle Eurocentrism pervade the interventions of non-local development workers. By supposedly focusing on the personal and the local as the sites of empowerment and knowledge, participatory approaches minimize the importance of the other places where power and knowledge are located, for example with 'us' in the Western development community and with the state. The chapter then addresses its second aim, which is to explore the possibility of moving beyond these pitfalls, weaving theoretical observations with a discussion of the work of Village Aid. Mohan calls for a radicalized hybridity, beyond bounded notions of self/other and insider/outsider; and a scaling up of local interventions, linking them to the complex processes of democratization, anti-imperialism and feminism." (12)
Henkel, Heiko and Roderick Stirrat. "Participation as Spiritual Duty; Empowerment as Secular Subjection."
"Heiko Henkel and Roderick Stirrat's Chapter 11 takes an anthropological approach. They are concerned with the practices, ideas and cosmologies of those who plan and practise 'development projects'. They begin by looking at genealogies of participation, which they identify as being primarily religious, noting that participation was a moral imperative of the Reformation, and tracing this imperative through nineteenth-century British non-conformism to the founding of British development NGOs. The chapter, like Chapter 5, then considers participation as a religious experience, but sees different parallels, particularly in the reversal of binary oppositions that characterize the work of both Robert Chambers and Christian traditions of 'the world turned upside down'. Henkel and Stirrat go on to address the notion of 'empowerment', which they claim may not be as liberating as the new orthodoxy suggests. The question that should be asked, they argue, is not how much people are empowered, but for what. Their own answer to this question is that participatory approaches shape individual identities, 'empowering' participants 'to take part in the modern sector of developing societies'. This empowerment is therefore tantamount, in Foucauldian terms, to subjection." (12-13)
I really need to learn to type faster ...
(Also, for this annotation, I'm just going to crib the Introductory summary of the essays contained in the volume, cause I lack the time/ambition to look at them all again right now.)
Cooke, Bill and Uma Kothari. "The Case for Participation as Tyranny."
"Taken together, these themes (there are other, which readers may identify) point to what for us is the fundamental concern. It becomes clear from a reading of the chapters in this book that the proponents of participatory development have generally been naive about the complexities of power and power relations. This is the case not only 'on the ground' between 'facilitators' and 'participants', between 'participants' and more widely between 'donors' and 'beneficiaries', but also historically and discursively in the construction of what constitutes knowledge and social norms. While analyses of power in participation are not new, what is evident here is that there are multiple and diverse ways in which this power is expressed; furthermore, articulations of power are very often less visible, being as they are embedded in social and cultural practices. Thus this book identifies a more nuanced set of understandings of the workings of power as being necessary, in order to uncover its varied and subtle manifestations in the very discourse of participation.
The genealogies and histories of development in general, and participatory practices in particular, that are found in some of these chapters further explicate how a misunderstanding of power underpins much of the participatory discourse. The identification of the (mis)interpretations of how and where power is expressed within participation compels us to reconsider the notion of empowerment, and the claims to empowerment made by many participatory practitioners. Since an understanding of the concept of 'empowerment' is based on particular realizations of its root concept, 'power', and since this, as some of the chapters in this book argue, has been simplified in the theory and practice of participation, the meanings ascribed to the condition of empowerment and the claims made for its attainment for those who have been marginalized must also be subjected to further scrutiny.
This confirms, for us, that we were right to discuss participation in terms of its tyrannical potential, remembering that tyranny is precisely about the illegitimate and/or unjust uses of power. The question we will not answer here, however, is whether this potential can be overcome. What we do suggest, however, is a starting point for those who might try to redeem it. This is to build a more sophisticated and genuinely reflexive understanding of power and its manifestations and dynamics. Written into this understanding must be a recognition that participatory development does not have a reified existence 'out there', but is constructed by a cadre of development professionals, be they academics, practitioners or policy-makers, whose ability to create or sustain this discourse is indicative of the power they possess. This must be accompanied by an acknowledgment that questions such as 'Whose reality counts?' (Chambers 1997), which suggest that there are contrasting versions of reality, mask the extent to which these development professionals, in their applications of the ideas of participatory development, are actually still engaged in the construction of a particular reality -- one that at root is amenable to, and justifies, their existence and intervention within it.
What we are calling for as a first step, therefore, is a genuine and rigorous reflexivity, one that acknowledges the processes and consequences of these constructions. This means going beyond the evident narrowness (verging on narcissism) of the existing self-acclaimed 'self-critical epistemological awareness' (Chambers 1997: 32) to draw on a deeper and more wide-ranging set of analyses than has hitherto been the case. This book has provided some of these analyses and, we hope, initiated this reflexivity. Ironically, though, authentic reflexivity requires a level of open-mindedness that accepts that participatory development may inevitably be tyrannical, and preparedness to abandon it if this is the case. Thus any meaningful attempt to save participatory development requires a sincere acceptance of the possibility that it should not be saved." (14-15)
Mosse, David. "'People's Knowledge', Participation and Patronage: Operations and Representations in Rural Development"
"David Mosse in Chapter 2 challenges the populist assumption that attention to 'local knowledge' through participatory learning will redefine the relationship between local communities and development organizations. Using project-based illustrations, he shows that 'local knowledge', far from determining planning processes and outcomes, is often structured by them. For example, what in one case was expressed as a 'local need' was actually shaped by local perceptions of what the agency in question could legitimately and realistically be expected to deliver. Indeed, 'participatory planning' may, more accurately, be view as the acquistion and manipulation of a new 'planning knowledge' rather than the incorporation of 'people's knowledge' by projects.
Mosse then shows how participatory ideals are often operationally constrained by institutional contexts that require formal and informal bureaucratic goals to be met. Participation nevertheless remains important as part of a projects as a 'system of representations'. As such, ideas of participation are oriented towards concerns that are external to project locations. There representations do not necessarily speak directly to local practice and provide little by way of guidance on project implementation, but they are important in negotiating relationships with donors, and more widely in underpinning positions withing development policy debates." (8)
Cleaver, Frances. "Institutions, Agency and the Limitations of Participatory Approaches to Development."
"In Chapter 3 Frances Cleaver also makes use of case studies, here in relation to water resource usage. The chapter begins by questioning 'the heroic claims made for development', and by presenting the case for understanding the role of social structure and of individual agency in shaping participation. Participatory development, Cleaver suggests, tends to conflate social structures with institutions, most commonly conceptualized as organizations, not least because such institutions apparently make social structures 'legible'. However, participatory development bureaucracies have preferences for institutional arrangements that may not correspond with those of 'participants'. Problems identified include and espousal of the importance of informal institutions while actual concentration is on the formal; the varying forms of participation that different institutional types require; the questionable assumptions about 'community' upon which participatory institution-building is based; and the tendency towards foundationalism about local communities.
The chapter goes on to consider the inadequacy of participatory approaches' models of individual agency and the links between these and social structures. The argument presented here is that understandings of the motivations of individuals to participate, or not, are vague, and simplistic assumptions are made about the rationality inherent in participating, and the irresponsibility of not doing so. Furthermore, participatory approaches fail to recognize how different, changing and multiple identities of individuals impact upon their choices about whether and how to participate, and overlook the potential links between inclusion in participatory processes and subordination." (8-9)
Hildyard, Nicholas, Pandurang Hedge, Paul Wolvekamp, and Somasekhare Reddy. "Pluralism, Participation and Power: Joint Forest Management in India."
Chapter 4, by [all those people above], examines, in light of the increasing fashion for participatory forest management, conflicts over the meanings of 'participation' and 'forests'. It begins by suggesting that the failure by donors to implement policies on participation is institutionally deep-seated and structural, and that through participatory is institutionally deep-seated and structural, and that through participatory development grassroots organizations are in danger of becoming 'the human software through which investments cn be made with least local opposition'. It then shows that while participatory Joint Forest Management project in which the chapter authors were involved as local activists of Northern-based solidarity groups. The authors conclude by arguing that unless participatory processes take into account the relative bargaining power of so-called stakeholders they are in danger of merely providing opportunities for the more powerful." (9)
Francis, Paul. "Participatory Development at the World Bank: the Primacy of Process."
"In Chapter 5 Paul Francis begins by summarizing the three main approaches to participation employed by the World Bank -- Beneficiary Assessment, Social Analysis, and PRA -- before going on to focus on the last of these. Initially the chapter sets out PRA's methodological and epistemological bases before questioning the relationship between 'the community' and 'the professional', suggesting inter alia that the importance of charismatic specialists, who claim a moral position combined with an inner-directedness and the symbolism of 'reversal', recalls the role of the shaman. Francis suggests that PRA is rite of communion, the performance of which 'enacts an exorcism, of sorts, of the phantoms of "conventional" development practice', and analyses the World Bank Participation Sourcebook as 'part self-improvement manual and part mythical text. At the same time, though, the reductionist simplifications of PRA techniques are noted. Next Francis considers the uptake of participatory approaches at the Bank within the context of the new emphasis on 'the social' in terms of process, consultation and partnership. He argues that underlying structural determinants of well-being are given little attention and that this is reinforced by the individualist nature of PRA, and the absence of any real alternative vision of development leaves it vulnerable to opportunism and co-option." (10)
Hailey, John. "Beyond the Formulaic: Process and Practice in South Asian NGOs."
"In Chapter 6 John Hailey draws on a range of ideas to question the formulaic approaches to participatory decision-making promoted and even imposed by donors and other development actors. These include Hoftstede's work on cross-cultural management, a Foucaldian analysis of power and the discourse of participation, and a recognition of the Cold War uses of community participation. Hailey begins by reviewing recent research into the development and growth of successful South Asian NGOs that suggested that NGO success resulted from the understandings of, and responses to, the needs of the local communities where they worked. However, research showed that this closeness to communities arose not from the application of the well-known formulaic approaches to participation -- indeed, they were conspicuous by their absence. Rather, as case examples in the chapter illustrate, success was achieved by a long-term effort by NGO leaders to build close personal relations with individuals and groups in the communities with which they worked, and with NGO staff. The chapter then offers three explanations for the absence of formulaic approaches to participation. The first is that they have real operational limitations, the second is that they are culturally inappropriate, and the third is that their history and the reality of the practice indicate that they might (legitimately) be seen as a means of imposing external control." (10)
Cooke, Bill. "The Social Psychological Limits of Participation?"
In Chapter 7, Bill Cooke uses four concepts from social psychology (risky shift, the Abilene paradox, groupthink, and coercive persuasion) to demonstrate how individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the presence -- real, imagined or implied -- of others. These concepts suggest that problems can arise as a consequence of the face-to-face interactions that are a defining feature of participatory development. Taken together the four concepts suggest that participatory process can lead people to take, first, collective decisions that are more risky than those they would have taken individually (i.e. risky shift). Second, they can lead to people taking a decision that participants have second-guessed is what everyone else wants, when the opposite is the case (the Abilene paradox). Third, particular dynamics, the symptoms of which include a belief in the inherent morality of what is being done, self-censorship, and the existence of 'mindguards', can lead to evidently wrong decisions, which can be harmful to 'outgroup' members (groupthink). Fourth, the manipulation of group processes can lead to malign changes in ideological beliefs, or consciousness (coercive persuasion). All four challenge participatory development's claims for effectiveness and empowerment, and suggest a disciplinary bias that permits the use of technology on the world's poor without the safeguards the rich would expect." (10-11)
Taylor, Harry. "Insights into Participation from Critical Management and Labour Process Perspectives."
"In Chapter 8 Harry Taylor challenges Robert Chambers' positive spin on the parallels between participatory development and participatory management. Taylor argues that participation in both cases is part of a wider attempt to influence power relations between elite groups and the less powerful -- be they individual project beneficiaries or the employees of organizations in the developing world. He makes his case by first drawing parallels between project beneficiaries and employees within organizations in terms of their relative dependancy and powerlessness. Moving on to consider arguments for participation from mainstream management, he suggests that even on its own terms doubts about its feasibility and desirability exist. From a more critical management perspective he then draw on Foucaldian and labour process critiques, which suggest that participation is always constrained, and hides and at the same time perpetuates certain sets of power relations. Taylore rounds off his chapter by suggesting why there is disillusionment with participation in both development and management arenas, and by speculating on the prospects for 'genuine' participation." (11)
Kothari, Uma. "Power, Knowledge and Social Control in Participatory Development."
"In Chapter 9 Uma Kothari challenges the truth claims made be participatory development. Like Harry Taylor and John Hailey she proposes a Foucauldian approach to the understanding of power, as something which circulates, rather than as something divided between those who have it and those who do not. This latter dichotomous approach typifies participatory development, and leads to practices based in conventional stratifications of power. These serve both to conceal daily oppressions in people's lives that run through every aspect of everyday life and to ensure that participants remain the subject of development surveillance. Although PRA seeks to reveal the realities of everyday life, paradoxically its public nature means that the more participatory it is, the more the power structure of the local community will be masked. The chapter concludes by drawing on the work of Goffman to consider how the ritual practices of PRA actually serve to subvert it, by producing front stage performances that conceal both the 'real' reality of the back stage, and come to be taken for that reality." (11-12)
Mohan, Giles. "Beyond Participation: Strategies for Deeper Empowerment."
"In Chapter 10 Giles Mohan has two major aims. The first is to critique participatory practices, in particular the ways in which local knowledge is supposedly produced as a reversal of 'top-down' approaches. This critique is made using the ideas associated with post-colonial studies and argues that a subtle Eurocentrism pervade the interventions of non-local development workers. By supposedly focusing on the personal and the local as the sites of empowerment and knowledge, participatory approaches minimize the importance of the other places where power and knowledge are located, for example with 'us' in the Western development community and with the state. The chapter then addresses its second aim, which is to explore the possibility of moving beyond these pitfalls, weaving theoretical observations with a discussion of the work of Village Aid. Mohan calls for a radicalized hybridity, beyond bounded notions of self/other and insider/outsider; and a scaling up of local interventions, linking them to the complex processes of democratization, anti-imperialism and feminism." (12)
Henkel, Heiko and Roderick Stirrat. "Participation as Spiritual Duty; Empowerment as Secular Subjection."
"Heiko Henkel and Roderick Stirrat's Chapter 11 takes an anthropological approach. They are concerned with the practices, ideas and cosmologies of those who plan and practise 'development projects'. They begin by looking at genealogies of participation, which they identify as being primarily religious, noting that participation was a moral imperative of the Reformation, and tracing this imperative through nineteenth-century British non-conformism to the founding of British development NGOs. The chapter, like Chapter 5, then considers participation as a religious experience, but sees different parallels, particularly in the reversal of binary oppositions that characterize the work of both Robert Chambers and Christian traditions of 'the world turned upside down'. Henkel and Stirrat go on to address the notion of 'empowerment', which they claim may not be as liberating as the new orthodoxy suggests. The question that should be asked, they argue, is not how much people are empowered, but for what. Their own answer to this question is that participatory approaches shape individual identities, 'empowering' participants 'to take part in the modern sector of developing societies'. This empowerment is therefore tantamount, in Foucauldian terms, to subjection." (12-13)
I really need to learn to type faster ...
Monday, September 3, 2007
Palmer, David Scott, ed. 1994. Shining Path of Peru. St. Martin's Press: New York.
This is collection of essays about Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) written just after the collapse of the movement after its leader was arrested in Lima. The book is important both for its discussion of Peruvian history and politics, and for its truly multiperspectival look at SL, with articles from researchers from different regions and different subject positions.
Palmer, David Scott. "Introduction: History, Politics, and Shining Path in Peru." The volume's introductory essay, but also a very good overview of Peruvian political dynamics, which have been incredibly volatile and not particularly democratic for most of the country's history.
Smith, Michael L. "Taking the High Ground: Shining Path and the Andes." Offers 7 propositions to explain Sendero, and since I'm a sucker for numbered lists, they are as follows:
1. Sendero bases its strategy on an understanding of the interplay between Andean society, politics, geography, and ecology.
2. In practical terms, Sendero's frame of reference works within a local or regional setting.
3. Sendero plays off the friction within the interface between urban and rural worlds.
4. Sendero's fetish for violence serves as a compass in navigating the waters of Andean ecopolitics.
5. Sendero's aim is to disorganize politics.
6. Sendero fills the vacuum it has created with three elements: a militarized party apparatus, armed violence, and an iron-clad ideology.
7. Sendero's pedagogical roots and experience give its ideology and praxis a utilitarian, didactic approach that belies its dogmatism.
Degregori, Carlos Ivan. "Return to the Past." Argues that Sendero is best understood in the context of Peruvian political history, especially the importance of education, authoritarianism, and indigenous narratives.
de Wit, Ton and Vera Gianotten. "The Center's Multiple Failures." "The underlying context for Peru's violence is a weak civil society and a weak state -- a society made up of disarticulated groups that are seldom mutually involved and a state unable to process effectively and respond appropriately to the demands of it population. Given this context, state coercion is the mechanism often used to maintain order and putative national unity." (73)
Isbell, Billie Jean. "Shining Path and Peasant Responses in Rural Ayacucho." A discussion of Sendero in Chuschi, which was where they initially launched their military campaign. Initially, the local population was very receptive, because Sendero promised both education and eradication of commonly accepted "public enemies" like cattle theives. However, the Sendero campaign of violence quickly turned the population, who redefined them as naqas, "flesh-eating beings feeding off a population with no more fat to give", and requested that the government station security forces in the town. (93)
Berg, Ronald H. "Peasant Responses to Shining Path in Andahuaylas." Another case study of Sendero history in a highland province. An excerpt:
"Our case study of Andahuaylas has focused on the specific economic and social processes in the region, particularly since the agrarian reform beginning in 1969. The state thwarted a radical, grass-roots movement for land reform and imposed its own bureaucratic cooperative structure. The cooperatives lacked accountability and functioned in many repects as the haciendas had. [See also Elisabeth Jean Wood's discussion of Salvadoran government cooperatives] Because their very creation ended the possibility of large-scale land redistribution, the cooperatives became foci of resentment by the peasants.
During this same period the economy became increasingly polarized and social tensions mounted. And entrepreneurial class filled the commercial vacuum left by the departure of the landlords, and these entrepreneurs prospered with the help of loans for commercial agriculture. At the same time, the downturn of the Peruvian economy led to depressed wages and unemployment for the rest of the population.
The emergence of Shining Path should not be seen simply as a reflection of poverty [see also Lichbach] but rather in terms of these specific circumstances. Sendero has been adroit at taking advantage of this situation, recruiting a core of devoted followers, organizing over a period of years, and attacking the objects of popular resentment -- upwardly mobile peasants and state-sponsored cooperatives.
The specific character of this peasant economy conditions the form of the rebellion. A majority of households depend on wage labor, both locally and in the cities, and the increasing dependence on wage labor makes peasants especially vulnerably to economic fluctuations. At the same time, Andahuaylas remains a region of small-holding peasants whose desire for land is intense. As peasant-workers, the agriculturalists of Andahuaylas rely on wages for a portion of their income, but they retain landholdings as a source of economic security. They also depend on forms of economic reciprocity as a central element in the agricultural economy. Peasant economy and society still are central to an understanding of Shining Path's growth in these areas.
Many peasants sympathize with Sendero because the movement reflects their longstanding aspirations for local control and for the ownership of plots of land. The movement attacks elements in rural society that are perceived as unjust and as in conflict with these fundamental goals. In this sense, support for SL fits a pattern of peasant rebellions against haciendas and the state since the end of the nineteenth century. For Sendero sets itself up as a moral authority and as a voice for peasants' grievances, playing upon cultural principles including notions of folk justice and opposition to mistis. Although many of Sendero's active supporters are young, mobile people with urban experience, their aspirations and values are shaped by their peasants background.
In spite of its ability to attract sympathy and support among parts of the peasantry, it is highly unlikely that Sendero will be able to capture state power or even to control large areas of the Andes for long periods of time. Sendero's secretive cell organization leads to effective small-scale guerrilla harassing operations, but not to the mobilizations of mass support. Its ideology is foreign to the peasants and at odds with many of their fundamental beliefs. It remains a highly destructive organization, offering the illusion of the resurrection of the Andean community but the reality of short-lived revenge against some of the objects of popular resentment." (120-121)
Gonzales, Jose E. "Guerrillas and Coca in the Upper Huallaga Valley." Sendero taxed coca production to fund its organization and UHV produces a lot of coca leaf. Of note in this article is a discussion of the successful counterinsurgency waged there by a maverick general who agreed to ignore the coca growers if they would help him fight SL. (130-133) The article concludes that when the Army ignores coca and focuses on SL, the growers flourish and SL wanes, but when police and DEA really focus on drug production, then the opposite is true.
Smith, Michael L. "Shining Path's Urban Strategy: Ate Vitarte." Ate Vitarte is poor district in Lima, and was the base from which Sendero launched its campaign of urban violence within Lima proper.
"A snapshot of the situation in mid-1990 shows that Sendero had secured its beachhead on the Central Highway and in Lima. Through infiltration, it paralyzed many of the grass-roots organizations along the Central Highway. Its hyperactive curiosity and hunger for intelligence led its activists to penetrate a whole range of local groups (soup kitchens, school milk programs, evangelical groups, temporary emergency work programs, and political parties). It meant there were no free forums where the local community could debate resistance without being fingered by spies and sympathizers ...
Across the range of its activities Sendero shows some consistent patterns. It uses the local conflicts to push for polarization and armed violence. It harnesses the processes of decline or anarchy, Peru's self-destructive tendencies, to the goals of the revolution. Prisons and courts, universities and secondary schools, striking trade unions and squatter settlements are foci of radicalization. By this approach, SL hopes to break down the organizations already in place and pick up those pieces that it may be able to turn to armed revolt. Frequently the government and its security services do Sendero a service by increasing pressure on these same foci. This tactic allows Sendero to concentrate its efforts on key leverage points within Peruvian society. Such a focusing of forces means that SL magnifies its presence and impact on grass-roots organizations well beyond its number of activists ...
As separate parts, Sendero's urban presence may seem insignificant. These parts, however, are integral to an overall strategy that augments its impact over time. With carefully laid plans, centralized command, organizational discipline, and meticulous care for detail, Guzman's followers have strategic and tactical advantages over their political adversaries. While mainstream parties, trade union federations, and the government mustered forces to meet peak moments (the November 1989 March for Peace, for instance), they could not sustain a coherent policy over the medium term.
Throughout the period under review, Sendero found itself aided and abetted in Lima by a breakdown in the presence of the state, just as was occurring in the countryside. Not only could the state not expand its services and authority into areas of need, but it lost control over neighborhoods and services that it already had in place. Schoolteachers no longer had adequate monitoring, police no longer patrolled the streets, and corruption became the currency to make things works. Those political and social forces that wanted to work through the system found themselves frustrated. Sendero and others who worked outside the established order found a more open track.
Finally, a host of individuals and institutions, from the presidency down to organizations that claimed to back Lima's poor and marginalized, failed to grasp Sendero's changing scope and thrust in urban areas. Although evidence began to pile up after the 1986 prison mutiny and intensified in mid-1988, Peru's elites put little effective effort and resources into confronting this threat. It was as if the lessons of Ayacucho and the Andes had been in vain." (162-163)
Gorriti, Gustavo. "Shining Path's Stalin and Trotsky." Key lesson: Do not have a threesome involving the girlfriend of the leader of a violent revolutionary organization. And, if you do, ensure you lock the door. Abimael Guzman Reynoso (aka Comrade Gonzalo) was the 'Stalin' of SL, and in the rise of the organization worked closely with the more charismatic and charming Luis Kawata Makabe (aka Kabo) who was insturmental in the early (nonviolent) phase of the organizations formation. Then Gonzola caught Kabo in flagrante delicto and life for Kabo quickly went downhill. By 1987 "[h]e had only a few of his teeth left and his skin was all dried out and stretched over his fragile face. His worn clothes also accurately displayed his misfortunes and current situation ... He told his friends that he had asked for an explanation for his expulsion from the party to which he had dedicated the best years of his life. 'I don't understand what's going on' he said. 'Let them explain things to me or let them kill me,' he observed, and then added with a toothless smile, 'Cheers!' ... Instead of seeking out his Trotsky to kill him, Guzman systematically broke his will to resist instead and then used what remained for whatever purpose suited him. As Guzman's Trotsky, Kawata lives and serves, and example to all who might resist the discipline and the orthodoxy of the party that their only course is to march onward in lock step for the cause of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Gonzalo." (185-187) So a note to all would-be revolutionaries -- hands off the boss' wife, mistresses, girlfriends, and assorted other consorts!
Tarazona-Sevillano, Gabriela. "The Organization of Shining Path." An excellent overview of how SL is set up, how people advance within the organization, the role of women, etc.
Marks, Tom. "Making Revolution with Shining Path." A short article that applies a theoretical framework to Sendero as an insurgency in order to explain the utility of terror as an insurgent tactic.
Woy-Hazelton, Sandra and William A. Hazelton. "Shining Path and the Marxist Left." A discussion of the relationship between legal parties and Sendero -- in short, Sendero's pursuit of violent revolution put the leftist parties in quite a pickle, because they were forced to ask to what extent they were contributing to the advent of world, or even Peruvian, social revolution. The answer split the leftwing parties and prevented the formation of an effective electoral coalition.
McClintock, Cynthia. "Theories of Revolution and the Case of Peru." Another application of theories of revolution to the specifics of the Peruvian case.
Palmer, David Scott. "Conclusion: The View from the Windows." This essay is really amazing and summarizes the rest of the book. Really, any questions about Sendero Luminoso should start here, then reference the rest of the book as necessary. It's another bulleted list, but has 18 items and requires explanation of each point, and I don't really feel like retyping the whole chapter.
Palmer, David Scott. "Introduction: History, Politics, and Shining Path in Peru." The volume's introductory essay, but also a very good overview of Peruvian political dynamics, which have been incredibly volatile and not particularly democratic for most of the country's history.
Smith, Michael L. "Taking the High Ground: Shining Path and the Andes." Offers 7 propositions to explain Sendero, and since I'm a sucker for numbered lists, they are as follows:
1. Sendero bases its strategy on an understanding of the interplay between Andean society, politics, geography, and ecology.
2. In practical terms, Sendero's frame of reference works within a local or regional setting.
3. Sendero plays off the friction within the interface between urban and rural worlds.
4. Sendero's fetish for violence serves as a compass in navigating the waters of Andean ecopolitics.
5. Sendero's aim is to disorganize politics.
6. Sendero fills the vacuum it has created with three elements: a militarized party apparatus, armed violence, and an iron-clad ideology.
7. Sendero's pedagogical roots and experience give its ideology and praxis a utilitarian, didactic approach that belies its dogmatism.
Degregori, Carlos Ivan. "Return to the Past." Argues that Sendero is best understood in the context of Peruvian political history, especially the importance of education, authoritarianism, and indigenous narratives.
de Wit, Ton and Vera Gianotten. "The Center's Multiple Failures." "The underlying context for Peru's violence is a weak civil society and a weak state -- a society made up of disarticulated groups that are seldom mutually involved and a state unable to process effectively and respond appropriately to the demands of it population. Given this context, state coercion is the mechanism often used to maintain order and putative national unity." (73)
Isbell, Billie Jean. "Shining Path and Peasant Responses in Rural Ayacucho." A discussion of Sendero in Chuschi, which was where they initially launched their military campaign. Initially, the local population was very receptive, because Sendero promised both education and eradication of commonly accepted "public enemies" like cattle theives. However, the Sendero campaign of violence quickly turned the population, who redefined them as naqas, "flesh-eating beings feeding off a population with no more fat to give", and requested that the government station security forces in the town. (93)
Berg, Ronald H. "Peasant Responses to Shining Path in Andahuaylas." Another case study of Sendero history in a highland province. An excerpt:
"Our case study of Andahuaylas has focused on the specific economic and social processes in the region, particularly since the agrarian reform beginning in 1969. The state thwarted a radical, grass-roots movement for land reform and imposed its own bureaucratic cooperative structure. The cooperatives lacked accountability and functioned in many repects as the haciendas had. [See also Elisabeth Jean Wood's discussion of Salvadoran government cooperatives] Because their very creation ended the possibility of large-scale land redistribution, the cooperatives became foci of resentment by the peasants.
During this same period the economy became increasingly polarized and social tensions mounted. And entrepreneurial class filled the commercial vacuum left by the departure of the landlords, and these entrepreneurs prospered with the help of loans for commercial agriculture. At the same time, the downturn of the Peruvian economy led to depressed wages and unemployment for the rest of the population.
The emergence of Shining Path should not be seen simply as a reflection of poverty [see also Lichbach] but rather in terms of these specific circumstances. Sendero has been adroit at taking advantage of this situation, recruiting a core of devoted followers, organizing over a period of years, and attacking the objects of popular resentment -- upwardly mobile peasants and state-sponsored cooperatives.
The specific character of this peasant economy conditions the form of the rebellion. A majority of households depend on wage labor, both locally and in the cities, and the increasing dependence on wage labor makes peasants especially vulnerably to economic fluctuations. At the same time, Andahuaylas remains a region of small-holding peasants whose desire for land is intense. As peasant-workers, the agriculturalists of Andahuaylas rely on wages for a portion of their income, but they retain landholdings as a source of economic security. They also depend on forms of economic reciprocity as a central element in the agricultural economy. Peasant economy and society still are central to an understanding of Shining Path's growth in these areas.
Many peasants sympathize with Sendero because the movement reflects their longstanding aspirations for local control and for the ownership of plots of land. The movement attacks elements in rural society that are perceived as unjust and as in conflict with these fundamental goals. In this sense, support for SL fits a pattern of peasant rebellions against haciendas and the state since the end of the nineteenth century. For Sendero sets itself up as a moral authority and as a voice for peasants' grievances, playing upon cultural principles including notions of folk justice and opposition to mistis. Although many of Sendero's active supporters are young, mobile people with urban experience, their aspirations and values are shaped by their peasants background.
In spite of its ability to attract sympathy and support among parts of the peasantry, it is highly unlikely that Sendero will be able to capture state power or even to control large areas of the Andes for long periods of time. Sendero's secretive cell organization leads to effective small-scale guerrilla harassing operations, but not to the mobilizations of mass support. Its ideology is foreign to the peasants and at odds with many of their fundamental beliefs. It remains a highly destructive organization, offering the illusion of the resurrection of the Andean community but the reality of short-lived revenge against some of the objects of popular resentment." (120-121)
Gonzales, Jose E. "Guerrillas and Coca in the Upper Huallaga Valley." Sendero taxed coca production to fund its organization and UHV produces a lot of coca leaf. Of note in this article is a discussion of the successful counterinsurgency waged there by a maverick general who agreed to ignore the coca growers if they would help him fight SL. (130-133) The article concludes that when the Army ignores coca and focuses on SL, the growers flourish and SL wanes, but when police and DEA really focus on drug production, then the opposite is true.
Smith, Michael L. "Shining Path's Urban Strategy: Ate Vitarte." Ate Vitarte is poor district in Lima, and was the base from which Sendero launched its campaign of urban violence within Lima proper.
"A snapshot of the situation in mid-1990 shows that Sendero had secured its beachhead on the Central Highway and in Lima. Through infiltration, it paralyzed many of the grass-roots organizations along the Central Highway. Its hyperactive curiosity and hunger for intelligence led its activists to penetrate a whole range of local groups (soup kitchens, school milk programs, evangelical groups, temporary emergency work programs, and political parties). It meant there were no free forums where the local community could debate resistance without being fingered by spies and sympathizers ...
Across the range of its activities Sendero shows some consistent patterns. It uses the local conflicts to push for polarization and armed violence. It harnesses the processes of decline or anarchy, Peru's self-destructive tendencies, to the goals of the revolution. Prisons and courts, universities and secondary schools, striking trade unions and squatter settlements are foci of radicalization. By this approach, SL hopes to break down the organizations already in place and pick up those pieces that it may be able to turn to armed revolt. Frequently the government and its security services do Sendero a service by increasing pressure on these same foci. This tactic allows Sendero to concentrate its efforts on key leverage points within Peruvian society. Such a focusing of forces means that SL magnifies its presence and impact on grass-roots organizations well beyond its number of activists ...
As separate parts, Sendero's urban presence may seem insignificant. These parts, however, are integral to an overall strategy that augments its impact over time. With carefully laid plans, centralized command, organizational discipline, and meticulous care for detail, Guzman's followers have strategic and tactical advantages over their political adversaries. While mainstream parties, trade union federations, and the government mustered forces to meet peak moments (the November 1989 March for Peace, for instance), they could not sustain a coherent policy over the medium term.
Throughout the period under review, Sendero found itself aided and abetted in Lima by a breakdown in the presence of the state, just as was occurring in the countryside. Not only could the state not expand its services and authority into areas of need, but it lost control over neighborhoods and services that it already had in place. Schoolteachers no longer had adequate monitoring, police no longer patrolled the streets, and corruption became the currency to make things works. Those political and social forces that wanted to work through the system found themselves frustrated. Sendero and others who worked outside the established order found a more open track.
Finally, a host of individuals and institutions, from the presidency down to organizations that claimed to back Lima's poor and marginalized, failed to grasp Sendero's changing scope and thrust in urban areas. Although evidence began to pile up after the 1986 prison mutiny and intensified in mid-1988, Peru's elites put little effective effort and resources into confronting this threat. It was as if the lessons of Ayacucho and the Andes had been in vain." (162-163)
Gorriti, Gustavo. "Shining Path's Stalin and Trotsky." Key lesson: Do not have a threesome involving the girlfriend of the leader of a violent revolutionary organization. And, if you do, ensure you lock the door. Abimael Guzman Reynoso (aka Comrade Gonzalo) was the 'Stalin' of SL, and in the rise of the organization worked closely with the more charismatic and charming Luis Kawata Makabe (aka Kabo) who was insturmental in the early (nonviolent) phase of the organizations formation. Then Gonzola caught Kabo in flagrante delicto and life for Kabo quickly went downhill. By 1987 "[h]e had only a few of his teeth left and his skin was all dried out and stretched over his fragile face. His worn clothes also accurately displayed his misfortunes and current situation ... He told his friends that he had asked for an explanation for his expulsion from the party to which he had dedicated the best years of his life. 'I don't understand what's going on' he said. 'Let them explain things to me or let them kill me,' he observed, and then added with a toothless smile, 'Cheers!' ... Instead of seeking out his Trotsky to kill him, Guzman systematically broke his will to resist instead and then used what remained for whatever purpose suited him. As Guzman's Trotsky, Kawata lives and serves, and example to all who might resist the discipline and the orthodoxy of the party that their only course is to march onward in lock step for the cause of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Gonzalo." (185-187) So a note to all would-be revolutionaries -- hands off the boss' wife, mistresses, girlfriends, and assorted other consorts!
Tarazona-Sevillano, Gabriela. "The Organization of Shining Path." An excellent overview of how SL is set up, how people advance within the organization, the role of women, etc.
Marks, Tom. "Making Revolution with Shining Path." A short article that applies a theoretical framework to Sendero as an insurgency in order to explain the utility of terror as an insurgent tactic.
Woy-Hazelton, Sandra and William A. Hazelton. "Shining Path and the Marxist Left." A discussion of the relationship between legal parties and Sendero -- in short, Sendero's pursuit of violent revolution put the leftist parties in quite a pickle, because they were forced to ask to what extent they were contributing to the advent of world, or even Peruvian, social revolution. The answer split the leftwing parties and prevented the formation of an effective electoral coalition.
McClintock, Cynthia. "Theories of Revolution and the Case of Peru." Another application of theories of revolution to the specifics of the Peruvian case.
Palmer, David Scott. "Conclusion: The View from the Windows." This essay is really amazing and summarizes the rest of the book. Really, any questions about Sendero Luminoso should start here, then reference the rest of the book as necessary. It's another bulleted list, but has 18 items and requires explanation of each point, and I don't really feel like retyping the whole chapter.
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