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The Primacy of Political Settlements in Democracy Promotion
Grassroots organizations in the Palestinian territories reached their zenith during the first Intifada (which literally means “shaking off”) between 1987 and 1993. This episode of coordinated mass upheaval and civil disobedience campaign throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip was not instigated or organized by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); rather, it was a popular mobilization initiated by a number of different organizations, committees, and institutions established in the occupied territories to resist Israel’s military occupation and to empower communities. Within the first weeks of the Intifada, grassroots committees had organized an array of local popular committees (lijan shaʿbiyya) throughout the occupied territories that would sustain and strengthen the Intifada.1 The popular committees were responsible for key tasks such as coordinating the daily activities of the Intifada, preparing for emergencies, cultivating self-sufficiency, and patrolling neighborhoods during the night.2 The degree of popular participation in this Intifada was unprecedented compared to earlier uprisings. Mass involvement in nonviolent forms of resistance was a radical departure from the earlier period in which only armed struggle was recognized as a legitimate form of resistance. Moreover, the Intifada represented a fundamental shift in the site of power from the PLO to the people under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS). The Intifada had its own leadership structure, the United Leadership Command, in which all major political organizations of the PLO were represented.
Similar to other grassroots organizations, the Palestinian women’s committees also reached their pinnacle of organizational success during this period. Countless women I interviewed who were directly involved in the daily activities of the Intifada highlighted the pivotal role of women during that period.3 It was this particular feature of the Intifada—the widespread participation of women—that, perhaps more than anything else, dramatized the extent to which Palestinian society had been stirred. Women’s widespread, grassroots-based, nonviolent civil disobedience was pivotal in supporting the uprising during this period.
The organizational efficacy of the first Intifada owed its success to decades of mass organizing by Palestinian political organizations.4 By the early 1980s, all factions of the PLO had established their own volunteer grassroots structures throughout the WBGS. These organizations included labor unions, agriculture unions, health unions, student groups, women’s groups, and various other professional unions and syndicates. These groups served to defend the interests of the various constituencies and enabled the participation and empowerment of local sectors of society. Each association, union, and grassroots organization was disparate and issue-oriented and reported to its respective parent political organization. These organizations were also volunteer based, and in line with the PLO’s sumoud policy (policy of steadfastness), they stressed self-help, a continuation of national resistance, and more hands-on participatory development.5
In sync with the developments that were taking place in the broader national movement, women members of the various political organizations also established women’s committees that would aid and facilitate mass mobilization. In 1978, women cadres from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) founded the first women’s committee, the Women’s Working Committee (WWC). The goal of the committee was to lend support to the national movement by involving women in resistance activities against the Israeli occupation and to empower and involve them in improving their daily living conditions. Though the founders were politically affiliated, the organization was not supposed to be partisan and was open to all women, regardless of their political affiliations. By 1981, the women’s group began to splinter along factional lines, and each of the political organizations established its own women’s committees.6 Women leaders from other political factions worried that the leaders of the WWC would later recruit some of the members to the DFLP and hence embarked on establishing their own committees (see table 5.2, which indicates the year in which each of the political organizations established its respective women’s committee).
During the 1980s, activities of the women’s sector were an integral and essential component of Palestinian political and social life. Most towns and villages had an array of women’s committees or groups that hosted weekly seminars, occasional courses, annual bazaars, and International Women’s Day events. The women’s committees were successful in assisting their members in their day-to-day lives, as well as in encouraging collective action among them. Projects addressed women’s practical needs such as health, sustenance, and small-scale vocational training, childcare, and literacy.7 Recruitment and the preservation of voluntary membership were contingent on genuine incorporation and inclusion. The potential to build on these local forms of sociopolitical organization were immense, especially in the emergence of a robust civil society. That potential, however, failed to materialize.
By the late 1990s, after the Madrid Peace Conference and the Oslo Accords, the extent of demobilization and weakening of these once thriving movements was evident to everyone. Membership in the labor unions, women’s mass-based organizations, student groups, and professional syndicates had decreased dramatically. These once thriving movements no longer had the capability to organize and coordinate any mass action. Despite mounting dissatisfaction with the Oslo Accords and the newly established PA, civic protest was limited to individual disputes, with little in the way of collective organizing. In contrast, however, Fatah, the PLO’s leadership party behind the Oslo Accords, still had the power to convene larger gatherings to lend support to the PA.
The absence of more organizing and protest was even more glaring considering the improvement in the security situation in the PA controlled areas. The redeployment of the Israeli military from the main town centers made reprisals against Palestinian protesters less likely. Moreover, the Palestinian territories were among the highest per capita recipients of Western donor funding in the world, with substantial allocations to democracy and civil society promotion.8 This amount translated to $1,820 per capita (per Palestinian living in the WBGS) each year in the first decade after the peace accords. Theoretically, the level of mass organization, which had become an essential feature of Palestinian political life, facilitated by improvements in the security situation and a massive influx of Western democracy promotion assistance, should have laid the groundwork for a strong civil society. On the contrary, Palestinian civil society became increasingly elitist, characterized predominately by professionalized NGOs, often run by a single individual, with limited societal reach.
After the start of the Madrid Peace Process in 1991, numerous mass-based organizations became recipients of Western donor assistance and professionalized their operations. The organization of civil society became distinguished by its vertical linkages between the professionalized NGOs and the grassroots. In this new structure, the previously active grassroots constituencies, at best, were merely recipients of services from the professionalized NGOs and not active, engaged members. Moreover, civil society development did not lead to the establishment of regular, constructive patterns of interaction with state institutions. Local government remained restricted in representing constituent interests. Electoral political competition also remained limited, and perhaps more accurately, was stunted in its infancy. In the 1996 Palestinian legislative elections, the overwhelming majority of candidates were Fatah members, and in the 2006 legislative elections, Hamas’s legislative victory led to a vicious backlash from Fatah and the international community, and the cessation of Western donor funding to the Hamas-led government. Despite massive discontent in the WBGS with the handling of the electoral outcome and Hamas’s reaction, Palestinian civil society groups did little to voice their grievances.
NGO Professionalization: An Inadequate Explanation
Many analysts—academics, policy makers, and activists alike—attributed this demobilization within these once-thriving movements to NGO professionalization triggered by the influx of Western donor assistance in the post-Oslo period.9 In agreement with an established and growing body of literature on the negative impacts of NGO professionalization, they argued that Palestinian social movements and the longer-term prospects for civil society and democratic development were undermined by this massive influx of Western donor funding. Western donors often required recipient institutions to institutionalize and professionalize their operations so that they are better able to keep detailed financial records and submit regular evaluation reports to their funders.10 This process includes a host of organizational changes, such as increased specialization, hierarchies of pay, more formal channels of communication and decision-making, and often a greater need for better-educated, English-speaking employees. Among the most obvious outcomes of NGO professionalization are a loss of autonomy,11 a focus on short-term goals as opposed to longer-term developmental goals, questionable sustainability, and greater accountability to donors rather than to the constituencies they are supposed to serve.12
This process of professionalization, which is not unique to the Palestinian territories, often results in the emergence of a new NGO elite.13 The creation of this new elite class affects local forms of political organizing in three fundamental ways. First, it contributes to the atomization of civil society, since the people who move to the NGO sector are usually former leaders of grassroots movements. Second, privileging the leaders of these groups, or those “more qualified” to participate in these NGOs, exacerbates social schisms between those who do and do not have a Western education, proficiency in English, and familiarity with Western standards and modes of operation of NGO activity.14 The NGOs serve as a lucrative alternative for the urban elite,15 as Western-funded NGOs provide salaries that are often three to six times higher than the local standard. The discrepancy in salaries attracts the most talented and skilled workers to the Western-funded NGO sector, away from the public sector, civil service, local political parties, or local grassroots organizations. Third, professionalization and NGO reliance on Western funding entails depoliticization and an embrace of less politically controversial endeavors as a way for the organization to survive.16 Professionalization-centered explanations, however, do not explain why the introduction of Western donor assistance and the outcomes of NGO professionalization vary in different contexts. Moreover, these explanations fail to take into account the primacy of political contexts. In particular, they neglect to consider how political contexts also determine variation in amounts and types of funding and inequitable access to resources and institutions, and how this variation shapes broader political developments. The continuation of Israel’s military occupation and disillusionment also do not fully explain this trajectory. If these were sufficient explanations, the Palestinian population of the WBGS would not have succeeded in organizing previously, under even more repressive security conditions.
Very importantly, political developments in the Palestinian territories contrasted sharply with other cases, such as El Salvador, which shared a number of important organizational and temporal similarities, but ultimately exhibited far more positive outcomes in terms of civil society and democratic development. In 1992, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and the government of El Salvador signed the Chapultepec Accords in Mexico. Similar to the Palestinian case, Western donors provided extensive postsettlement assistance that facilitated the professionalization of certain mass-based organizations. NGO professionalization in El Salvador, however, did not result in the same extent of demobilization of previously active sectors. Rather, civil society development encouraged the incorporation of grassroots constituencies and facilitated citizens’ ability to engage the state. The development of civil society entailed the institutionalization of productive patterns of engagement with local government (see figure 1.1). Moreover, competition and a smooth turnover became defining features of El Salvador’s presidential, legislative, and local elections. After two decades of Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Nationalist Republican Alliance, ARENA), presidential victories, the FMLN won both the 2009 and 2014 presidential elections. Indeed, the degree of political competition and the smooth turnover of power from ARENA, El Salvador’s right-wing party, to the FMLN in presidential and legislative elections reflected the vigor of political life in the country.
Similar to the PLO, the political-military organizations of what became the FMLN embarked on mass-movement mobilization in the mid-1970s and established their own mass-based structures in the controlled zones17 that included rural workers, teachers, students, women, and repopulated and war-displaced persons.18 In the preaccord period, these associations shared similarities in terms of grassroots character, functions, and relationship to the political organizations. As in the Palestinian case, such organizations played central roles in resistance, consciousness-raising, provision of community services, and organization of cooperative economic enterprises.
Similar to the Palestinian case, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the political-military organizations succeeded in recruiting women in large numbers, and in genuinely involving them in the struggle through mass-based organizations.19 Each political-military organization established its own mass-based women’s organizations (see table 5.3, which shows the year that each political-military organizations established its affiliated mass-based women’s organization). The level of organization during this period, especially among the leftist opposition, laid the groundwork for what could become an effective civil society that could represent large segments of the population who would not otherwise be represented. In both contexts, the programs and projects of the women’s sector addressed women’s practical needs such as health, sustenance, childcare, literacy, and small-scale vocational training.
Following the election of Christian Democrat José Napoleón Duarte in 1984, political openings in El Salvador increased; because US engagement required the appearance of democracy, blatant repression was less tolerated. Consequently, many of the political-military organizations of the FMLN and the Christian base communities were able to operate more openly and established their own women’s mass-based organizations between 1985 and 1988, many of them in San Salvador and not in the controlled zones20 (see table 5.3).
After the signing of the Salvadoran peace accords in 1992, there also was an influx of donor assistance. Even after professionalizing their operations, however, these women’s organizations, as with many other mass-based organizations, retained their mass character. In fact, donors often required these organizations to maintain regular engagement with their mass constituencies. The Palestinian case, however, and specifically the formerly active mass-based organizations, pointed to how unequal access to resources as well as institutions to engage the state became a defining feature of post-Oslo political life. This unequal access and the polarization that transpired were not simply an outcome of foreign donors requiring institutions to professionalize their operations. Even in the absence of the massive influx of Western donor assistance and requirements for institutional professionalization, Palestinian civil society and democratic developments would have remained constrained because, ultimately, the Oslo Accords were not meant to deliver and promote democracy. The massive influx of foreign aid that followed, including assistance to develop civil society and democracy, was intended to buttress the Oslo Accords and to promote those groups and constituencies that did not oppose the Oslo Accords.
Figure 1.1. Political settlements, donor assistance, and civil society outcomes. This figure was slightly modified from the original that first appeared in Manal A. Jamal, “Democracy Promotion, Civil Society Building, and the Primacy of Politics,” Comparative Political Studies 45, no. 1 (January 2012): 3–31. Reprinted by permission of SAGE.
The Centrality of Political Settlements
In this book, I depart from predominant explanations of civil society and democracy outcomes that solely focus on foreign donor assistance and related professionalization dynamics.21 My analysis takes the argument a step back and concentrates on those factors that shape the emergent political context. I argue that political settlements, broadly understood as the formal and informal political agreements that define political relations in certain contexts, shape the impact of democracy promotion assistance. The “inclusivity” of political settlements (assessed by the extent of participation of major political groups and the degree of societal support) shapes the relative effectiveness of democracy promotion efforts and the impact of Western donor assistance on civil society and democratic development more generally. Democracy promotion efforts are bound to fail in contexts where the political settlement enjoys limited societal support and key political constituencies are excluded—despite the backing of dominant political groups and Western state-sponsored donors. In these contexts, Western donor assistance will minimize cooperation, exacerbate political polarization, and weaken civil society by promoting favored groups over others. This is especially true if the interests of dominant political groups and Western foreign donors coalesce to marginalize important political sectors. Conversely, in inclusive contexts, Western donor assistance will play a more positive role, helping civil society and democratic development.
Political settlements frame political relations and outcomes, determine key players, and shape societal conflict management systems.22 In conflict-to-peace transitions, political settlements specifically refer to peace agreements. According to Stephan Haggard and Robert Kauffman, the settlement terms refer to both “formal constitutional rules and the informal understandings that govern political contestation in the new democratic system.… Terms include military prerogatives, rights of participation in political life, design of representation and decision making institutions.”23 In many ways, they are most similar to pacted transitions,24 or what Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter define as
an explicit, but not always publicly explicated or justified, agreement among a select set of actors which seeks to define (or better, to redefine) rules governing the exercise of power on the basis of mutual guarantees for the “vital interests” of those entering into it.25
Transition theorists generally concur that “pacted transitions” lead to the most stable and successful transitions to democracy.26 These transitions ensure that the rules of democratic politics are acceptable to the largest proportion of the elite population.27 Although stability may characterize these transitions, scholars agree that noninclusive arrangements may ultimately marginalize certain groups and sectors of the population, thus affecting the quality of the emergent democracies.28 Similarly, during conflict-to-peace transitions, political settlements play a pivotal role in defining the most and least relevant actors. External actors also often play key roles in negotiating political settlements in these transitions, as opposed to in ordinary democratic transitions, which tend to be more of an internal, domestic affair. Ultimately, noninclusive political settlements undermine the conflict-to-peace transition, as well as the quality of the emergent democracy.
During conflict to peace transitions, political liberalization and democratization processes may inherently exacerbate polarization and conflict,29 especially where preexisting religious and ethnic schisms may exist.30 Furthermore, the prospects for peace and democratization are bleak when there are unsatisfactory political pacts,31 and especially when the settlements are noninclusive.32 The more prescriptive peace-building33 and conflict-resolution literatures concur that the broader inclusion of different actors and constituencies enhances the longer-term prospects for the cessation of violence, peace-building, and democratic development.34 However, this fundamental understanding does not appear to figure prominently in the programming of Western donors who work in the promotion of democracy (what is often referred to as the Western democracy promotion establishment). This oversight has profound implications for the impact of their work. Although the extant literature has acknowledged how political bargaining influences the institutions that emerge35—and in turn, how institutional engineering influences electoral outcomes,36 conflict resolution goals,37 and the emergent state38—these works tell us little about the broader contexts that spawn political bargaining dynamics, the institutions that emerge, and the role of Western donors.
A growing body of literature has sought to assess the impact of Western democracy promotion assistance on democratic outcomes. A number of these works, often quantitative in approach, have examined the relationship between foreign aid, including democracy assistance, and democratic outcomes. Scholars, however, do not agree on the nature of this relationship. Some have found positive relationships39 or negative relationships,40 while others have found no direct relationship at all.41 Although the quantitative research overwhelmingly establishes a positive relationship between foreign aid (including democracy assistance) and civil society and democratic outcomes, I do not fundamentally disagree with this approach. For the most part, however, as my analysis illustrates, in-depth case study examination illuminates the limitations of this approach since multiple dimensions and dynamics of these relationships simply cannot be captured by quantitative macro correlations. The amount of assistance per country is one factor, but the type and approaches of assistance are as important, if not more important. Fewer works have elaborated more explicit causal mechanisms. Pertaining to Western donor assistance and civil society development in particular, some scholars have focused on institutional professionalization, political and cultural constraints,42 or on preexisting ethnic and religious cleavages that may inhibit civil society development.43 Institutional professionalization, as I have explained, is not an adequate explanation to account for divergent outcomes. And although preexisting cleavages are important to consider, the political settlement remains pivotal to institutionalizing these divisions, or in harnessing ethnic, political, and social divisions. Moreover, in post-Communist regimes, although Western donors are inclined to support nonleftist groups that support liberal democracy, it is fair to say that the political settlements (even if informally) are noninclusive in these societies, but to a lesser degree than in conflict to peace transitions where a settlement is formally defined. Other scholars have focused on the importance of civil society’s legacy in a given context, or its embrace of “universally embraced” norms.44 Societies with a strong legacy of grassroots organization will persist in that tradition,45 regardless of the type and quantity of Western donor assistance they receive. There are many cases, however, that may have had a strong legacy of civil society organizing that experience a decline regardless of the historical precedent or prevalent norms.
A number of works have focused on Western donors’ lack of understanding of the contexts in which they operate and their reluctance to address the key challenges at hand while prioritizing their geostrategic interests.46 Jason Brownley, for example, forcefully argued that the United States has often worked to ensure that democracy does not take root, as in the case of Egypt, prioritizing its own geostrategic interests over political reform.47 Benoit Challand provided a cogent explanation of how donors can play a role in promoting and excluding certain NGOs.48 These explanations, however, fail to fully account for how political contexts lead to divergent outcomes, and, more specifically, how noninclusive arrangements exacerbate these negative outcomes. Foreign donors are not operating in vacuums. Some may counter that the variation in democracy assistance may account for the difference in outcomes, but it is important to note that democracy programs do not vary extensively depending on the donor. The difference lies in the types of programs and projects that are prioritized in certain countries or contexts and the amounts of funding.49
This book addresses these omissions head on. It focuses on how political settlements shape the institutional engineering process and the unfolding relations between different civil society and political groups in these contexts, as well as how Western donor assistance mediates these processes. Western donors mediate these outcomes by encouraging certain patterns of engagement between different civil society and political groups, as well as with state institutions. Western donors also influence the degree of impact by the amount of funding they provide.
The inclusivity of the political settlement (in a given context), my key explanatory factor, shapes the impact of donor assistance on civil society and democratic development in three fundamental ways: who is included and who is not; degree of foreign donor involvement and program priority; and levels of institutionalization.
Inclusivity and Who Is Included and Who Is Not?
First, political settlements affect who receives funding and who does not and thus the strategies adopted by different actors. As a result, these settlements shape the degree of horizontal and vertical polarization between individuals, groups, and organizations that receive funding (and hence can professionalize) and those that do not receive funding. In turn, the settlements affect the degree of vertical hierarchy between those organizations that receive Western donor funding and those that do not. Funded organizations are required to professionalize their operations and often become service providers to the unfunded organizations. As I discuss in more detail in chapter 5, in the post-Oslo era, the mass-based women’s organizations in the Palestinian territories that were affiliated with the Oslo opposition were often not able to access Western donor funding. In the new reconstituted women’s sector, these mass-based organizations became the recipients of services and training from those organizations that were not as vocally opposed to the Oslo Accords. In this way, Western donors mediated relations between those who were included and those who were shunned by the settlement. These findings are not limited to the Palestinian territories and El Salvador, but extend to other cases. In noninclusive contexts such as Iraq, Western donors, and especially United Stated Agency for International Development (USAID), allocated all its assistance to anti-Ba’ath groups. In inclusive contexts, such as postapartheid South Africa, Western donor assistance was far less political and did not work to promote and exclude different political and civil society groups.
Inclusivity and Degree of Foreign Donor Involvement and Program Priority
Second, the political settlements determine the amounts of funding and types of programs donors are more likely to promote. Donors, especially state-sponsored donors, will likely be more involved and commit higher amounts of funding where settlements are more fragile and their geostrategic interests figure more prominently. Geostrategic considerations may influence which programs are implemented, and donors may not prioritize a stronger civil society or democratic development. Where donors become more involved and commit higher amounts of funding, their impact is greater. Higher amounts of funding also often require more stringent professionalization criteria. As I will explain in more detail in chapter 4, foreign donors prioritized aid to civil society development in the Palestinian territories in contrast to El Salvador, where they were more likely to prioritize economic development programs in the post-accord period. Along these same lines, the United States was more heavily involved supporting right-wing groups in El Salvador during the Cold War. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, it had appeared that liberal market-democracy had nearly triumphed in Latin America in contrast to the Middle East. All Latin American countries had adopted neo-liberal economic reform policies.50
Inclusivity and Institutionalization—Articulated versus Disarticulated Spaces
Third, in addition to determining suffrage and equal opportunity to formulate preferences and have preferences equally considered by the state,51 the political settlement will impact political institutionalization at the local and national levels of government in a given context,52 as well as electoral institutional design, and, in turn, shape citizen participation. These two levels of government are of particular relevance to this study because they facilitate relations between the state and civil society, and hence shape citizen participation. Through electoral laws and the frequency of elections, dominant groups influence the ability of opposition groups to participate in elections and prevail at certain levels of government. In turn, electoral outcomes influence how much and what type of access opposition groups (and affiliated NGOs) will have to council or assembly representatives in local government and the national legislative bodies.53 As I will elaborate in chapter 3, because of the noninclusivity of the political settlement in the Palestinian territories, Fatah, the leadership party of the PA, has repeatedly postponed elections.
In noninclusive contexts, opposition groups and individuals will either not have access to these institutions (in this case, national legislative bodies or municipalities) or will remain a step removed from them compared to included groups. Western donors are less likely to fund programs and projects that will require cooperation or interaction with these institutions if “unfavored” groups may become represented in them, or the donors will simply avoid them altogether. Under these circumstances, CSOs are more constrained by the institutional setting since they are limited in terms of both their access to the state and their ability to make demands on it. Given the noninclusivity of these institutions and the lack of Western donor programs to encourage citizen participation between civil society and state institutions, what I refer to as “disarticulated spaces” pervade. In these spaces, institutions that should provide connecting channels between civil society and the state are lacking or discriminate against certain groups by not allowing them the same access.
Conversely, in politically inclusive contexts, if all major political groups are involved, ruling groups are more likely to design and endorse more inclusive political institutionalization at both levels. More representative national and local government bodies will also provide civil society with more institutional openings. Moreover, Western donor-promoted civil society development will not necessarily play a discriminating role favoring certain groups over others, and will likely promote programs that encourage more regular citizen engagement with the state, leading to more “articulated spaces,” and hence to a more effective civil society.
In the post–Cold War era of liberal market-democracy consensus, the interests of key Western state-sponsored donors and dominant political groups often align to exclude certain political groups; this has had important implications for civil society and democratic development. In transition contexts, Western donors pay significant attention to civil society’s promise to promote and entrench political settlements and promote what I refer to as a “post–Cold War liberal order.” This political-economic order is committed to market-democracy and the advancement of civil and political rights, with lesser regard for economic rights and economic well-being. It is also more Western and liberal in its social orientation.54 Given the priorities of Western geostrategic interests in the immediate post–Cold War period, these dynamics were most pronounced in the Middle East. It is important, however, not to reduce this state of affairs to the incompatibility between the West and Islam; rather, Western state-sponsored donors have worked to exclude parties that do not support Western-endorsed status quos. Hence, those excluded often not only oppose dominant political settlements but also are not well positioned to promote a “post–Cold War liberal order.” This category includes Islamists, as well as leftists who refuse to embrace this status quo. What is remarkable about this state of play is that the West and many dominant political groups embrace the notion of democratic governance that is based on exclusion.
Civil Society
Before proceeding, it is important to clarify what exactly is meant by civil society and how it relates to this study.55 Scholars generally agree that civil society is “a sphere of activity in which private citizens first constitute a public.”56 It speaks to the conditions of citizenship in a given polity, including both the virtues and dispositions of individual citizens.57 Of specific concern to this study, however, are those organizations and social collectivities that facilitate political participation and influence and make demands on the state.58 Civil society facilitates political participation by aggregating and representing citizen interests, countering state power, and furthering the struggle for citizenship rights. This study does not subscribe to the notion that all NGOs are part of civil society.59 Rather, NGOs that seek to influence state policy or demand greater inclusion in national political structures are CSOs. Local NGOs that are part of civil society should be able to organize various constituencies, drawing on their needs and demands, and not simply implement the agendas of foreign donors or external actors. Civil society can contribute to the delivery of humanitarian relief, support the reintegration of former combatants, facilitate refugee return, improve the performance of political and economic institutions, and cultivate greater trust between different parties through civic engagement.60 However, unless a service-provider NGO is simultaneously concerned with influencing and shaping broader political processes, including state policies, it should not be considered part of civil society. Social movements are involved in conflictual relations with clear opponents, are linked by dense networks, and have a collective identity, but they are not necessarily facilitating political participation and making demands on the state.
For civil society to accomplish these tasks, certain characteristics and contextual factors must obtain.61 A more dense and plural civil society that is inclusive of broad social sectors will better contribute to the development of democracy; in such contexts, citizens from all walks of life, not only the elite or certain political groups, are afforded greater opportunities to participate in civic life.
Horizontal versus Vertical Networks
CSOs should also be rooted in society and be able to forge horizontal linkages with other CSOs and with grassroots constituencies.62 Horizontal linkages are necessary for the strengthening of civil society and the longer term prospects for democratic development, because, as Robert Putnam explained, “a vertical network, no matter how dense and no matter how important to its participants, cannot sustain social trust and co-operation.”63 Furthermore, vertical networks are not likely to generate citizen participation or engagement because they reinforce existing hierarchy and polarization and decrease the likelihood of cooperation.64 A cross-cutting, horizontally organized civil society will incorporate grassroots constituencies beyond simply providing services to them. More effective incorporation will contribute to the better organization of interests and, in turn, to the growth of cooperative networks.
Access to Resources and Networks
Access to resources and networks is also critical, because, although a level of trust is necessary for citizens to engage in political participation, a conception of social capital that solely focuses on trust provides little insight into the “actual mechanisms by which social relations facilitate or block individual and collective access to resources.”65 Social capital (conceived as both the social trust and “norms of reciprocity” that facilitate cooperation, as well as access to resources and networks that facilitate civic engagement) will strengthen civil society.66
Political Institutionalization
Lastly, the extent of political institutionalization in a society, specifically at the national and local government levels, will also impact the performance of civil society.67 These institutions provide the connecting channels between civil society and the state. Well-developed institutions of local government in particular will provide more political openings for local participation and thus facilitate the emergence of an effective civil society.68 In contexts in which these political institutions are weak or absent, the performance of civil society will suffer.
The Imprecise Demarcation between Civil Society and Political Society
Although the autonomy of civil society is an important criterion, the relationship between civil society and political society69 is not necessarily one of separation. A closer observation indicates that much of civil society during transitions—democratic transitions or conflict-to-peace transitions more generally—is often borne out of political society. According to most accepted Western liberal understandings, political society and civil society are two demarcated political realms, and political society represents those forces that seek to capture state power. However, one can more accurately describe the interactions between these two realms as forever shifting sites of contest, as individuals move from one site to another. Moreover, a less autonomous society that has greater capacity to reach broader constituencies is far more promising than a more autonomous civil society that is limited in its societal reach. An appreciation of this actual relationship puts into perspective how autonomous civil society actually is or can be.
The Study and Methodology
The book casts a broad lens on the question of why democracy promotion efforts are more successful in some cases as opposed to others. It begins with an examination of the divergent outcomes pertaining to democracy promotion in two cases of conflict-to-peace transitions, the Palestinian territories and El Salvador. It examines these developments at a more macro, general level in terms of democratic outcomes and then at the level of civil society by tracing transformations in one social movement sector—the women’s sector—in each case. The book then generalizes these findings by expanding the temporal and geographic aperture of the study. First, it examines developments in the Palestinian territories surrounding Hamas’s election victory in 2006. Then it expands this discussion to Iraq and South Africa to illustrate how the respective political settlements shaped the different outcomes and how Western donor assistance mediated these processes.
The more general discussion about the divergent democratic outcomes in the two cases brings the study to the present period. The more specific examination of developments in the women’s sectors in each case, however, focuses on the immediate post-settlement period.70 As opposed to a more recent examination, this time frame captures the immediate changes these societies underwent after the influx of postsettlement foreign donor assistance. This ten-year period allowed me to assess how the influx of postsettlement aid transformed the sector, as well as how it impacted the relations that transpired in the decade that followed. This time period also comprehensively captured the scope of transformation in each case in the postsettlement period; a more focused time period would not have encapsulated the breadth of organizational change and adjustment in each context. In this section of the study, I employed a structured, focused comparison that is historically sensitive but conducive to generalizing across cases. This method allowed for a more rigorous examination of the different outcomes by isolating certain variables. Political settlements are the key explanatory variable I examined. In keeping with the requirements for structured focused comparison, I collected data on the same variables across cases. I assessed the quality of civil society and prospects for democratic development by evaluating the extent to which different civil society groups forged horizontal linkages with one another, and their capacity to engage local and national levels of government. In both cases, I focused on the political centers, the Jerusalem-Ramallah access area in the Palestinian territories and San Salvador in El Salvador.
Research
This book draws from research conducted during five fieldwork trips: February 2002 to June 2002 in El Salvador, and June to October 2001, September to October 2006, July to August 2009, and August 2013 in Palestine. My research draws from over 150 formal semistructured and open-ended interviews. I conducted these interviews in the Palestinian Territories and El Salvador with grassroots activists, political leaders, directors and program officers in donor agencies, and directors of NGOs (for a more detailed discussion of interview case selection and sampling, refer to appendices I and II). My research also entailed participant observation, especially in terms of attending political events and protests and visiting professionalized organizations and the offices or headquarters of grassroots committees. It also relied heavily on the collection of primary and secondary materials, including newspaper articles, reports, government documents, and books in Arabic, English, and Spanish. I also examined in detail donor funding to El Salvador and the Palestinian territories, focusing more in depth on funding to civil society, democracy promotion, and women. This research project relied on several donor funding data sources, including primary reporting from donor agencies and NGOs, interviews with directors of donor agencies and NGOs, and country national-level reporting. To enhance data comparability and to corroborate and validate findings, the project also drew from data of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The Comparative Examination: Similarity and Divergence
The Palestinian and Salvadoran cases illustrate how the inclusivity of political settlements and the mediating role of Western donor assistance can lead to drastically divergent outcomes in cases that shared similar political and organizing trajectories during a certain phase of the respective conflicts. The comparison is across cases as well as between the presettlement and postsettlement periods in each case. Both cases experienced protracted conflicts in the latter part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, both contexts have also been shaped by extensive imperial encounters. The temporal parallels and similar trajectories of what became FMLN and PLO grassroots organizing justify this comparison. During the 1970s and 1980s, the political factions and organizations of the PLO and the FMLN both adopted policies of mass mobilization and established their own grassroots structures that included labor unions, agriculture unions, health unions, student groups, women’s groups, and various other professional unions. In the early 1990s, the Palestinian territories and El Salvador began conflict-to-peace transitions, and Western donors provided extensive donor assistance.
Notwithstanding the historical and temporal similarities, key features distinguished the Palestinian and Salvadoran cases. In the Palestinian case, the conflict was between Israel and the Palestinian territories and their main representative, the PLO, and based on a history of colonial settlement, land appropriation, and military occupation; Palestinians were internally divided vis-à-vis an external enemy and occupier.71 In El Salvador, the conflict was a civil war grounded in class conflict between the government of El Salvador and the FMLN—two domestic parties.72 Conceivably, a civil war resolution is more likely to involve a larger number of domestic actors, necessitating higher levels of domestic support as opposed to “interstate” conflict. The Salvadoran conflict also centered on class conflict and economic grievance, whereas the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was more political and polarized along national lines.73 Some would argue that the inequality-based differences in El Salvador were more amenable to amelioration than nationality-based differences. Moreover, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was complicated by its colonial settlement nature, and that the Palestinian leadership was predominately based abroad. It is important to note, however, that much of the Salvadoran FMLN leadership was also based abroad in the period before the peace accords. Very importantly, however, regardless of the type of conflict, polarization will result when a political settlement fails to garner the support of major domestic political actors or important societal constituencies. Moreover, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the internal divisions among Palestinians are rooted in political differences and not identity-based differences. Just as the economic basis of the conflict was not fully addressed in the Salvadoran case, the political bases of the conflict were not fully addressed in the Palestinian case.
Others may contend that the Palestinian territories do not constitute a full-fledged state, and that this accounts for the divergent outcomes. The WBGS, however, are recognized as a state and treated as such by the international community and by the people who inhabit that territory.74 Moreover, the PA is an institutionalized political organization that carries out the functions of a state, such as tax extraction, education, and health provision.75 I am also examining the impact of the political settlement and Western donor assistance on social movement sectors. These social movement sectors were able to organize before the establishment of the PA.
The political settlements also differed in terms of the stages embodied, the scope of the agreements, and, most significantly, the levels of inclusivity and extent of societal support they enjoyed. In the Palestinian case, the initial Declaration of Principles (DOP) culminated in agreements involving renegotiation and the spelling out of implementation details. Fatah, the leadership party, negotiated these agreements on behalf of the PLO. Although the accords in this case were meant to serve as only interim agreements and were nonbinding, they did not meet minimal Palestinian nationalist aspirations. Critics pointed out that the Palestinians had not received any guarantees for a future independent, sovereign, viable state, nor any guarantees to halt Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied territories. Ultimately, the Oslo peace process and related initiatives would enjoy little support among Palestinians in the territories.76 Most of the Palestinian political organizations, both leftist and Islamist, as well as prominent secular Palestinian intellectuals, did not support or endorse the peace accords. The renegotiation agreements did not expand beyond the bilateral, narrow participation of the PLO (represented by Fatah) and Israel that characterized the DOP interim agreements.77 While negotiations in the Palestinian context moved toward interim arrangements that sought independent statehood, in El Salvador negotiations moved toward a final and comprehensive agreement addressing human rights, land redistribution, and ex-combatant reintegration. Also, a United Nations peace operation was actively involved.
By 1989, the Salvadoran government and the FMLN had reached a military stalemate with no clear victors.78 As a result, both parties agreed to a negotiated settlement. The Salvadoran agreements built consensus on the different issues and culminated in a comprehensive final framework agreement that included agreements reached over the preceding two years. In contrast to the Oslo Accords, the Salvadoran peace accords enjoyed high levels of political inclusion and societal support. Although groups such as the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats did not sit at the negotiating table, they were part of the Inter-Party Commission that endorsed the accords and were not marginalized by the terms of the agreement. Had these parties opposed the accords and been excluded as a result, similar polarization dynamics as in the Palestinian case would have transpired despite the variation in conflict type or extent of UN involvement. The conclusion of the Salvadoran civil war became known as the “negotiated revolution.”79
Relatedly, some may argue that a key distinguishing feature that led to the divergent outcomes was the “settledness” or the extent to which the conflicts have been settled in these two cases. Democracy promotion will be a smoother process in more settled cases, and Anna Jarstad and Timothy Sisk’s recommendation that it is better to settle a conflict and then promote democracy certainly applies here.80 Regardless of the settledness of a conflict, however, democracy promotion in noninclusive contexts will exacerbate polarization and undermine the longer term prospects for democratization.
More restrictive security environments and limited governmental support conceivably could also account for different civil society outcomes. Most notably, the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 and the continuation of Israel’s encroachments against the Palestinian territories may have further challenged civil society institutions, resulting in different trajectories. These factors alone, however, do not explain variation within a case, or the underlying rationale for governments or other dominant groups to favor one group over another. The Palestinian case had experienced a restrictive security environment prior to the Oslo Accords, and this did not prevent political mass-based mobilization. Moreover, such factors do not explain why cases also experiencing societal insecurity related to crime and poverty may undergo more constructive civil society developments, as in El Salvador.
In chapter 7, I examine Iraq and South Africa. This examination departs from our standard two-by-two analysis that seeks to show the impact of my key explanatory factor in the absence of mediating factors. Such a treatment is not possible given that almost every country in the world is or has been a recipient of some form of democracy promotion assistance in the post–Cold War era. In both cases, however, associational life emerged from the political organizations of the pretransition period, yet we see divergent outcomes in the transition period. In Iraq, as a result of the noninclusive settlement, almost all institutions affiliated to the former ruling Baʿath Party were marginalized in the transition, and Western democracy promotion efforts worked to exclude all former affiliated associations and promote nonaffiliates, further exacerbating the ensuing polarization. Alternatively, in South Africa, the political settlement ensured that all political organizations and their affiliated institutions would be included in the transition. Democracy promotion efforts worked to facilitate this inclusion, and thus we witness the emergence of a much more coherent civil society and democratic development process.
Assessing the Quality of Civil Society and Democratic Development
Although the breadth of citizenship in a society is a useful indicator for gauging the quality of civil society and democracy in a given polity,81 a sole focus on rights does not tell us much about how broader changes affect the exercise of democracy. To this end, this study focuses on democratic outcomes, including changes in civil society. Pertaining to democratic outcomes, I assessed presidential, legislative, and local elections, focusing on the impact of timing, frequency, and the laws that govern these elections. I assessed changes in civil society by tracing how the mass-based organizations, and specifically women’s mass-based organizations, were reconstituted after the start of the conflict to peace transitions, and how access to funding, including Western donor assistance, shaped these processes. I studied the impact of the political settlement by determining which organizations and individuals could access Western donor funding depending on their position vis-à-vis the peace accords. Then I examined the patterns of interaction that transpired between the different tendencies, paying particular attention to the degree to which the relationship is horizontal versus vertical, and the degree of cooperation and polarization. I assessed the extent of horizontal linkages and cooperation between the professionalized NGOs by examining the number of cooperative meetings, joint programs, and coordinating mechanisms in which they participated. I assessed the quality of horizontal linkages between the professionalized NGOs and mass-based groups by examining the extent of incorporation and interaction that went beyond simply service provision. Throughout, I compared these dynamics to the presettlement period, the period before the peace accords. My examination also focused on the accessibility of the state to different women’s groups, and the ability of different tendencies of the women’s movement to make representative demands on the state at both the local and national levels. To this end, I also examined the extent of meetings and interactions between activists of the women’s sector and local and legislative government representatives.
I assessed these patterns by examining all the women’s sector programs of the professionalized NGOs and grassroots organizations in the Ramallah and San Salvador areas. This examination included the careful screening of program documents and the websites of all the major women’s organization, as well as interviews with the NGO directors, heads of gender desks, or program coordinators who could provide more detail about these programs. I also interviewed activists of the women’s sector who had also been active in the preaccord period and could discuss changes between the pre- and postaccord periods. I corroborated my findings by examining program descriptions from donor agencies, and through interviews with activists who participated in these programs. (I elaborate on my interview selection in appendices I and II.)
In both cases, I focused on the women’s organizations in the political centers of the Palestinian territories and El Salvador. To guarantee that my findings in the Ramallah-Jerusalem access area were representative of developments in the women’s sector in other geographic locations in the Palestinian territories, I conducted additional semistructured interviews with women activists in the Gaza Strip and Hebron. In El Salvador, my interviews also addressed women’s organizing in different regions of the country.
Foreign donor assistance is my key intervening variable.82 Most of the funding received by CSOs in the cases I examined was from foreign sources, especially Western sources. To comprehensively capture the mediating role of foreign donor assistance on civil society and democratic development, this book examined democracy promotion related assistance and broader compositions of aid to more carefully determine who received aid and who did not, and for which programmatic priorities. To this end, I first examined general flows of donor assistance to the Palestinian territories and El Salvador in the immediate postsettlement period, including assistance to government and civil society, and then focused more specifically on donor assistance allocations to the women’s sector, which extended well beyond democracy promotion assistance. This more comprehensive approach was necessary since ultimately both democracy assistance and development assistance shaped political outcomes. As Thomas Carothers explained, “The initial gulf between democracy support and development aid has indeed diminished.”83 Development assistance can very well impact civil society groups, or democratic outcomes more generally, and vice versa. Moreover, although institutionally, the bridges are partial, when examining the impact on a sector, there is no compelling rationale to assess these foreign donor assistance domains in isolation. Pertaining to the post-2006 Hamas electoral victory period, I focused predominately on the aid mechanisms put in place and the broader impact on associational life.
Why the Women’s Sectors?
The women’s sectors in both cases were successful in incorporating women in large numbers as well as addressing their needs. The women’s sectors also produced a number of leaders who went on to become major actors in the national politics of both the Palestinian territories and El Salvador.84 During the 1980s, the women’s organizations in both contexts relied predominantly on solidarity funding, or funding funneled through the FMLN or the PLO in the respective cases. In the early 1990s, more readily available Western funding served as an impetus for many of these organizations to professionalize and institutionalize. After the initiation of the peace accords in both contexts, women’s organizations attracted considerable amounts of foreign donor assistance. Women’s socioeconomic status also did not vary extensively in these two societies, and therefore cannot account for the variation in outcomes in the two cases (see table 5.1).
It is important to note, however, that two key factors distinguished the women’s organizations in the two contexts. In the Salvadoran case, women’s participation in the opposition, and especially among the leadership, was not limited to the mass movements but often also extended to the guerrilla organizations. Additionally, each political organization, and by extension its women’s groups, operated in its controlled territory through its vertical chain of command. In contrast, in the Palestinian territories, founders of the women’s organizations for the most part did not have a military background, and the political organizations did not limit their organization to a designated territory of the WBGS but organized throughout the territory. These differences, however, cannot account for the variation in outcomes. In disagreement with the literature that focuses on the gendered outcomes in the women’s sector,85 I argue that the developments in this sector are not unique, but rather are representative of developments in other sectors of civil society. The parallel historical and organizational trajectories between the women’s sector and other sectors, such as labor unions, student groups, and agricultural development committees, make these findings generalizable to other sectors of civil society. In “Beyond the Women’s Sectors” section of chapter 7, I illustrate how these findings extend to other sectors such as labor.
Outline of the Remaining Chapters
Chapters 2 sets the stage for this study. It begins with a brief historical overview of the conflict in the two cases, and a more detailed discussion of the emergence of the political-military organizations and their affiliated mass-based organizations, including the women’s sectors. The chapter draws from interviews with the leaders of the women’s committees and organizations since many were members of the political organizations tasked with establishing the affiliated mass-based women’s groups.
I develop my argument in chapters 3, 4 and 5. Chapter 3 illustrates how the degree of inclusivity of the political settlement affected civil society and electoral institutional design, as well as legislative and local government institutionalization in the two cases. Chapter 4 develops the second part of my argument about how the political settlement determined the amounts and types of foreign donor funding, and specifically Western donor funding, as well as the programs that donors prioritized given the context in which they were operating. It examines the history and changes in donor assistance in the two cases from the start of the conflict-to-peace transitions. Chapter 5 examines the impact of the political settlement and the mediating role of Western donor assistance at the level of civil society. It assesses these changes by examining transformations in the women’s sector in the postsettlement period in each case. It draws heavily from primary interviews with the women who established these organizations, and the women who shaped and lived through these changes. Their reflections about these processes and the broader political changes these societies underwent anchor this chapter. Chapter 6 broadens the temporal aperture of the study. It examines the impact of the evolving political settlement and the mediating role of Western donor assistance in the Palestinian territories, and the Gaza Strip in particular, in the aftermath of Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory. Unlike chapter 5, this chapter does not trace changes in a sector of civil society, but it looks at the more general transformations in the political landscape and in associational life. Chapter 7 returns to the question I started with: Why are democracy promotion efforts more successful in some cases as opposed to others? I also briefly discuss two other cases of conflict-to-peace transitions, namely Iraq and South Africa, to evaluate the defining impact of political settlements and the mediating role of Western donor assistance to illustrate how the findings in this book are by no means limited to the initial two cases.
What historical trajectories in the two cases led to the establishment of the political organizations and their affiliated mass-based organizations? This is the central question that chapter 2 tackles.
