Voting Amid Violence PDF Download

Author: Steven Lynn Taylor
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781555536985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Timely lessons from Colombia on the coexistence of civil democracy and political violence in the context of international affairs and institutional reform

Author: Abbey Steele
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150171239X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War is one of few books available in English to provide an overview of the Colombian civil war and drug war. Abbey Steele draws on her own original field research as well as on Colombian scholars’ work in Spanish to provide an expansive view of the country’s political conflicts. Steele shows how political reforms in the context of Colombia’s ongoing civil war produced unexpected, dramatic consequences: democratic elections revealed Colombian citizens’ political loyalties and allowed counterinsurgent armed groups to implement political cleansing against civilians perceived as loyal to insurgents. Combining evidence collected from remote archives, more than two hundred interviews, and quantitative data from the government’s displacement registry, Steele connects Colombia’s political development and the course of its civil war to purposeful displacement. By introducing the concepts of collective targeting and political cleansing, Steele extends what we already know about patterns of ethnic cleansing to cases where expulsion of civilians from their communities is based on nonethnic traits.

Author: Javier Giraldo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Behind the media's focus on Colombia's drug war is an unmentioned horror story: the Dirty War that has given Colombia the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. With icy precision and passionate prose, Father Giraldo and Noam Chomsky reveal the deadly landscape of what Eduardo Galeano termed the "Democratatorship": how the United States helped Colombia carry out unrelenting human rights travesties; how the paramilitary system functions to shield the military from connection to death squad activities; and what Americans can do to change a situation funded with our tax dollars.

Author: A. Ricardo López-Pedreros
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478003294
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
In Makers of Democracy A. Ricardo López-Pedreros traces the ways in which a thriving middle class was understood to be a foundational marker of democracy in Colombia during the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide array of sources ranging from training manuals and oral histories to school and business archives, López-Pedreros shows how the Colombian middle class created a model of democracy based on free-market ideologies, private property rights, material inequality, and an emphasis on a masculine work culture. This model, which naturalized class and gender hierarchies, provided the groundwork for Colombia's later adoption of neoliberalism and inspired the emergence of alternate models of democracy and social hierarchies in the 1960s and 1970s that helped foment political radicalization. By highlighting the contested relationships between class, gender, economics, and politics, López-Pedreros theorizes democracy as a historically unstable practice that exacerbated multiple forms of domination, thereby prompting a rethinking of the formation of democracies throughout the Americas.

Author: Jorge Pablo Osterling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000675394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
In what is destined to prove the definitive text for the present generation on the political, economic, and social structure of Colombia, Jorge Pablo Osterling explores the enigmatic nature of this special, even critical, anchor to the northern tier of South America. In many ways, Colombia is a huge success story: it is one of the oldest, most stable, functioning democracies; the land is blessed with rich and diversified resources and products; and its foreign debt has been kept in check as a consequence of sound economic management.But despite its positive social, cultural, economic, and political indicators, Colombia has been a nation beset by serious problems: overt corruption and unemployment are very high; and its public service facilities to outlying rural areas remain weak, thus making schooling, water supplies, health care, and electrification hard to establish at high levels. Above all, Colombia has a reputation, well earned, as one of the most violent nations in the world. Drug trafficking, common crime, and guerrilla activity are all pandemic and conspire to destabilize the regime.In this straightforward, compelling account, Osterling shows how this paradox has evolved, and why it has persisted over the past fifty years. He draws attention to parallel political structures: a functioning set of civilian institutions that coexist alongside one of the most powerful closed, hierarchical political elites in Latin America. Osterling locates the central problem of the maintenance of interpersonal relations as being more important to the functioning of Colombian society than impersonal norms. This is a country in which political bosses vie with popular democracy for control of the country.

Author: William Aviles
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791482049
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Through the lens of global capitalism theory, William Avilés examines democratization and civil-military relations in Colombia to explain how social and international forces led to the ostensibly contradictory outcome of democratic and economic reform coinciding with political repression. Focusing on the administrations in power from 1990 to the present, Avilés argues that the reduction in the institutional powers of the military within the state reflected changes in the structure of the global economy, the emergence of globalizing technocrats and politicians, and shifts in U.S. foreign policy strategies toward "democracy promotion." These same factors explain Colombia's establishment of a low-intensity democracy—a structure of elite rule in which the strategies of coercion (state and para-state repression) and consensus (competitive elections, civilian control over the military) maintain control and legitimacy. In the age of capitalist globalization, a low-intensity democracy is most concomitant with neoliberalism, establishing the political and economic environment most suitable to the investments of transnational corporations.

Author: James E. Sanders
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Contentious Republicans explores the mid-nineteenth-century rise of mass electoral democracy in the southwestern region of Colombia, a country many assume has never had a meaningful democracy of any sort. James E. Sanders describes a surprisingly rich republicanism characterized by legal rights and popular participation, and he explains how this vibrant political culture was created largely by competing subaltern groups seeking to claim their rights as citizens and their place in the political sphere. Moving beyond the many studies of nineteenth-century nation building that focus on one segment of society, Contentious Republicans examines the political activism of three distinct social and racial groups: Afro-Colombians, Indians, and white peasant migrants. Beginning in the late 1840s, subaltern groups entered the political arena to forge alliances, both temporary and enduring, with the elite Liberal and Conservative Parties. In the process, each group formed its own political discourses and reframed republicanism to suit its distinct needs. These popular liberals and popular conservatives bargained for the parties’ support and deployed a broad repertoire of political actions, including voting, demonstrations, petitions, strikes, boycotts, and armed struggle. By the 1880s, though, many wealthy Colombians of both parties blamed popular political engagement for social disorder and economic failure, and they successfully restricted lower-class participation in politics. Sanders suggests that these reactionary developments contributed to the violence and unrest afflicting modern Colombia. Yet in illuminating the country’s legacy of participatory politics in the nineteenth century, he shows that the current situation is neither inevitable nor eternal.

Author: Scott Mainwaring
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107175526
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.

Author: Grace Livingstone
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813534435
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This work is an introduction to who's who and what is really happening in Columbia. In one volume, it brings together the best material published on the war, the economy, social impact and prospects of peace in Columbia.

Author: Doug Stokes
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848136129
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This controversial book maintains that in Colombia the US has long supported a pervasive campaign of state violence directed against both armed insurgents and a wide range of unarmed progressive social forces. While the context may change from one decade to the next, the basic policies remain the same: maintain the pro-US Colombian state, protect US economic interests and preserve strategic access to oil. Colombia is now the third largest recipient of US military aid in the world, and the largest by far in Latin America. Using extensive declassified documents, this book shows that the so-called "war on drugs", and now the new war on terror in Colombia are actually part of a long-term Colombian "war of state terror" that predates the end of the Cold War with US policy contributing directly to the human rights situation in Colombia today.