Book Description




Democratizing Democracy


Book Description

The majorconflicts between the Global North and the South can be expected toresult from the confrontation of alternative conceptions of democracy,mainly between liberal or representative democracy and participatorydemocracy. The hegemonic model of democracy, while prevailing on aglobal scale, guarantees no more than low-intensity democracy. Inrecent times, participatory democracy has exhibited a new dynamic,engaging mainly subaltern communities and social groups that fightagainst social exclusion and the suppression of citizenship. In thiscollection of reports from the Global South-India, South Africa,Mozambique, Colombia, and Brazil-De Sousa Santos and his colleaguesshow how, in some cases, the deepening of democracy results from thedevelopment of dual forms of participatory and representativedemocracy, and points to the emergence of transnational networks ofparticipatory democracy initiatives. Such networks pave one of the waysto the reinvention of social emancipation. This is volume 1 of the Reinventing Social Emancipation project, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.




The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements


Book Description

Since the re-democratization of much of Latin America in the 1980s and a regional wave of anti-austerity protests in the 1990s, social movement studies has become an important part of sociological, political, and anthropological scholarship on the region. The subdiscipline has framed debates about formal and informal politics, spatial and relational processes, as well as economic changes in Latin America. While there is an abundant literature on particular movements in different countries across the region, there is limited coverage of the approaches, debates, and theoretical understandings of social movement studies applied to Latin America. In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements, Federico M. Rossi presents a survey of the broad range of theoretical perspectives on social movements in Latin America. Bringing together a wide variety of viewpoints, the Handbook includes five sections: theoretical approaches to social movements, as applied to Latin America; processes and dynamics of social movements; major social movements in the region; ideational and strategic dimensions of social movements; and the relationship between political institutions and social movements. Covering key social movements and social dynamics in Latin America from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements is an indispensable reference for any scholar interested in social movements, protest, contentious politics, and Latin American studies.




Decentralization and Party Politics in the Dominican Republic


Book Description

Recently in the Dominican Republic, a pro-municipal social alliance pressed for decentralization and politicians yielded, seeking power in three-party competition. This study examines how electoral, financial, and administrative power has been dispersed and suggests innovative strategies to maintain decentralizing momentum.




Democratizing the State


Book Description

Democratic institution-building experiences, innovative forms of social organization, and the development of multiple state-society interfaces represent a significant political phenomenon in Latin America in the last half-century. By comparing the two largest countries of the subcontinent, Brazil and Mexico, Democratizing the State examines social accountability and social control regimes. These regimes are conceived configurations of relationships between actors, organizational structures, norms, and resources, all arranged in a stable and institutionalized manner to exert social control over state actors and functions. The book addresses the contrasting characteristics and different functions through which the citizenry and civil society exert control over state action in both countries. Characterizing these experiences broadly as regimes is novel and enlightening regarding the work of practitioners and scholars on political participation, social accountability, and democracy in the global South and the global North.




Participatory Democracy in Brazil


Book Description

The largely successful trajectory of participatory democracy in post-1988 Brazil is well documented, but much less is known about its origins in the 1970s and early 1980s. In Participatory Democracy in Brazil: Socioeconomic and Political Origins, J. Ricardo Tranjan recounts the creation of participatory democracy in Brazil. He positions the well-known Porto Alegre participatory budgeting at the end of three interrelated and partially overlapping processes: a series of incremental steps toward broader political participation taking place throughout the twentieth century; short-lived and only partially successful attempts to promote citizen participation in municipal administration in the 1970s; and setbacks restricting direct citizen participation in the 1980s. What emerges is a clearly delineated history of how socioeconomic contexts shaped Brazil’s first participatory administrations. Tranjan first examines Brazil’s long history of institutional exclusion of certain segments of the population and controlled inclusion of others, actions that fueled nationwide movements calling for direct citizen participation in the 1960s. He then presents three case studies of municipal administrations in the late 1970s and early 1980s that foreground the impact of socioeconomic factors in the emergence, design, and outcome of participatory initiatives. The contrast of these precursory experiences with the internationally known 1990s participatory models shows how participatory ideals and practices responded to the changing institutional context of the 1980s. The final part of his analysis places developments in participatory discourses and practices in the 1980s within the context of national-level political-institutional changes; in doing so, he helps bridge the gap between the local-level participatory democracy and democratization literatures.




Affect, Archive, Archipelago


Book Description

Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s and Marta Aponte Alsina’s critical-creative work, this book explores how Puerto Rico’s affective archive of Caribbean relations, from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first, has envisioned and embodied decolonization and sovereignty in relation to the archipelagic, the sea, and Caribbean regionalism. The book’s transdisciplinary archive includes historical figures and their legacies; political and activist thought, textuality, and action as performative interventions; and performance and live arts pieces, objects, materialities, and texts as political/activist actions. Affect, Archive, Archipelago begins by delving into the historical-political figures of Ramón Emeterio Betances, Luisa Capetillo, and Pedro Albizu Campos. It then encounters the work of the live arts collective Agua, Sol y Sereno; the political/activist work of Amigxs del MAR, Comuna Caribe, Mujeres que Abrazan la Mar, and Coalición 8M; and Teresa Hernández’s transdisciplinary artistic trajectory. Finally, stemming from the book’s argument and the immediate historical-political-affective context of Puerto Rico’s summer 2019 rebellion (Verano Boricua), the book offers some reflections and proposals for furthering decolonial, sovereign, archipelagic, and reparatory horizons for Puerto Rico




Barrio Rising


Book Description

Beginning in the late 1950s political leaders in Venezuela built what they celebrated as Latin America’s most stable democracy. But outside the staid halls of power, in the gritty barrios of a rapidly urbanizing country, another politics was rising—unruly, contentious, and clamoring for inclusion. Based on years of archival and ethnographic research in Venezuela’s largest public housing community, Barrio Rising delivers the first in-depth history of urban popular politics before the Bolivarian Revolution, providing crucial context for understanding the democracy that emerged during the presidency of Hugo Chávez. In the mid-1950s, a military government bent on modernizing Venezuela razed dozens of slums in the heart of the capital Caracas, replacing them with massive buildings to house the city’s working poor. The project remained unfinished when the dictatorship fell on January 23, 1958, and in a matter of days city residents illegally occupied thousands of apartments, squatted on green spaces, and renamed the neighborhood to honor the emerging democracy: the 23 de Enero (January 23). During the next thirty years, through eviction efforts, guerrilla conflict, state violence, internal strife, and official neglect, inhabitants of el veintitrés learned to use their strategic location and symbolic tie to the promise of democracy in order to demand a better life. Granting legitimacy to the state through the vote but protesting its failings with violent street actions when necessary, they laid the foundation for an expansive understanding of democracy—both radical and electoral—whose features still resonate today. Blending rich narrative accounts with incisive analyses of urban space, politics, and everyday life, Barrio Rising offers a sweeping reinterpretation of modern Venezuelan history as seen not by its leaders but by residents of one of the country’s most distinctive popular neighborhoods.




Adult Education in Communities


Book Description

Participation can be a double-edged sword in that it can be used to bind people into agendas and policies they have little control over or it can help enable them to give voice to real and significant issues. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, genuine participation has to be an open and democratic process which enables all to contribute to the creation of meanings. Adult education in communities can then be involved in the process of creating ‘really useful knowledge’, that is, knowledge which enables people – individuals and collectivities who experience systematic forms of oppression, domination and exploitation – to think about, analyse and act on their situation individually and severally. By drawing on contemporary accounts of emancipatory action and participatory research the author elaborates on the role of adult educators in this context. (From the Preface) This book tries to reflect on adult education and its close relationships with communities. It is a modest attempt to maintain adult education in the scope of the community life against the growing schooling, the focus on employability, and on the labour market. In the last years it seems that adult education has become a kind of provider of diplomas, skills and competences and has forgotten its role to enlighten individuals and help them to share their community life with an abundance of richness, diversity, sadness and happiness. Adult Education is intrinsically connected to daily life, and the life that individuals constantly edify in their interactions. If adult education is connected to daily life, one of the major tasks is to recover this feeling and to link daily life and education. I think that at present time, in a moment of intense reductionism, reality is usually presented as very plain, losing its complexity and diversity that are related to the fact that life is being lived everyday by men and women as creators and relational beings.




La Revolucion Bolivariana Democratiza Los DD Hh Basicos


Book Description

Sobre el libro: La Revolución Bolivariana es un proceso en marcha y está creando colectivamente y democráticamente, paso a paso, golpe a golpe un nuevo modelo de estado. El estado bolivariano es auténtico se fundamenta en la historia, las ideas solidarias de Simón Bolívar y la prioridad de los derechos humanos básicos de "seguridad y subsistencia" de todos los venezolanos sin exclusiones. Es revolucionario primero porque incorpora participativamente a un sector mayoritario de la población -incluyendo a los pobres y a los militares-- que habían sido históricamente marginados y excluidos de la política, la economía y la sociedad. Segundo, porque el nuevo modelo de "Seguridad y Subsistencia" es lo opuesto a su predecesor histórico: el modelo de "Seguridad Nacional" o "Pacto de Punto Fijo." La "Seguridad Nacional" fue impuesta desde los Estados Unidos durante la guerra fría a toda su área de influencia y ha causado estragos: guerras, muertes, torturas y la violación sistemática de los derechos humanos en Venezuela, en Latinoamérica y en muchas partes del mundo. Tercero, porque el modelo bolivariano ofrece una respuesta democrática y solidaria al capitalismo salvaje que propone el neo-liberalismo en la actualidad. Venezuela hoy nos ofrece algo radicalmente diferente, es "la posibilidad optimista" de una democracia nueva, solidaria, soberana, socialista, moderna, no dogmática y por qué no, ecológica.