Anarchy, State, and Dystopia: Venezuelan Economic Institutions before the Advent of Oil

This article studies the evolution of Venezuelan economic institutions before the emergence of oil exploitation in 1920. We argue that, by 1920, Venezuela had developed a highly centralised state and a professionalised military. These two institutions ensured that growing oil revenues would strengthen the state structure and protected Venezuela from the resource-conflict trap into which many oil-abundant countries have fallen. We also argue that the failure to develop institutions that could mediate between sectoral demands and the state, the subordination of property rights to political imperatives and the political dominance of the commercial-financial elite conditioned the nation's response to the post-1920 influx of oil revenues.     

Mining against the State? Gold Mining and Emerging Notions of Territoriality in Southeastern Venezuela

The current economic crisis in Venezuela has drawn members of Pemón communities to the practice of informal (illegal) gold mining, as mining, undertaken alongside other ‘traditional’ economic activities, is a more effective source of income than waged jobs. The increased involvement of Pemón people in informal mining has encouraged their partial retreat from the state's frontiers, and it reveals transformations in the ways in which local people imagine and relate to the Venezuelan state. These transformations are embodied in both a reorganisation of the space, and in burgeoning notions of land ownership.     

Undemocratic Democracy: Venezuela and the Distorting of History

President Hugo Chávez has been the subject of much frenzied comment, as much at academic conferences as in the press. Criticism has been to a great degree personalised against his very visible public profile. The crisis of democracy in Venezuela has been widely ascribed to faults committed by the traditional parties since the early 1980s and reflected in the coterminous rise in crime and violence. Support for Chávez, or even objective comment, has been at a premium. This article looks at the crisis of democracy across a wider timescale and sees the ‘most stable democracy in Latin America’ to have been deeply flawed from the outset. It reflects an earlier propaganda campaign, similarly short on meaningful analysis, aimed at undermining the popularity of a previous unconventional leader of Venezuela, Marcos Pérez Jiménez. It is claimed that Venezuelans want to preserve democracy but are also ready to support military coups to oust corrupt or inefficient politicians. Is Chávez merely representative of transient anti‐party feeling or could the history of Venezuelan democracy have caused a more fundamental change in relationships between the mass of the people and their leader?     

Conspiracy Mongering in Venezuela: The Chavismo Period (1998–2018)

Hugo Chávez's rise to power in 1998 brought many changes to Venezuela's political culture. One transformation not frequently commented on is the constant formulation of conspiracy theories, both by chavismo supporters and by its opponents. This article discusses some of those conspiracy theories, relating to the deceased Venezuelan President's origins, his religious beliefs, the 2002 failed coup d'état, and Chávez's own death. It also addresses more recent conspiracy theories relating to Nicolás Maduro's birth, economic warfare, and drug smuggling operations. Venezuela is currently undergoing a major humanitarian crisis, and this article defends the view that, at least partially, conspiracy mongering has been a factor in Venezuela's collapse. As part of Venezuela's reconstruction, this article recommends that Venezuelan political forces need to reach a consensus and agree not to make ridiculous conspiratorial claims.     

Asserting State Authority through Environmental Monitoring: Venezuela in the Post‐Gómez Era, 1935–1945

In Venezuela, the task of consolidating the central state fell to Presidents Eleazar López Contreras (1936–1941) and Isaías Medina Angarita (1941–1945). This meant asserting fiscal control over the oil companies operating in the state of Zulia as well as appeasing restive working and middle classes. The government sought to exert power over both by moving towards a system of environmental monitoring of the petroleum industry. López Contreras was reluctant to apply real political pressure to the companies and accordingly environmental monitoring tended to be lax. Medina Angarita personally visited zulianos and made fiery speeches designed to assuage Venezuelan pride. What is more, he allowed the press to denounce the companies for their environmental abuse. Through his environmental monitoring efforts, Medina demonstrated to the companies that the state was a force to be reckoned with.     

‘Democracy under Threat’: The Foundation of the Opposition in Venezuela

This article sheds new light on how the Venezuelan Opposition was created and, more widely, on contemporary Venezuelan politics. By focusing on the Opposition's articulation of democracy, the article examines how this movement became possible and how it succeeded in maintaining support. Opinion articles covering the period October 2001 to April 2002 were analysed using the theoretical framework of logics within discourse theory. The article argues that although the Opposition succeeded in maintaining its support throughout Chávez's government, it contributed to the polarised politics that currently characterises Venezuela.     

The Meanings of Democracy in Venezuela: Citizen Perceptions and Structural Change

Throughout Latin America, democratic political structures reflect liberal conceptualizations of democracy. Since the election of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela has emerged as an exception, with President Chávez sponsoring initiatives designed to foster participatory democracy. This article draws on the Venezuelan case in an effort to gain insight on the malleability of citizens' definitions of and attitudes toward democracy. Two key findings emerge. First, in data gathered ten years into the Chávez presidency, the vast majority of Venezuelans still define democracy in liberal terms, whereas relatively few have embraced participatory conceptualizations. Second, although Venezuelans as a whole are highly supportive of democracy as a form of government, no evidence is found that either support for Chávez or defining democracy in terms of participation corresponds with higher favorability toward democracy. Together, these findings suggest that Venezuela's political transformation has produced little or no discernible effect on mass sentiment regarding democracy.     

Social Correlates of Party System Demise and Populist Resurgence in Venezuela

Considering its strong, highly institutionalized two-party system, Venezuela was surely one of the least likely countries in Latin America to experience a party system breakdown and populist resurgence. That traditional party system nevertheless was founded on a mixture of corporatist and clientelist linkages to social actors that were unable to withstand the secular decline of the oil economy and several aborted attempts at market liberalization. Successive administrations led by the dominant parties failed to reverse the economic slide, with devastating consequences for the party system as a whole. The party system ultimately rested on insecure structural foundations; and when its social moorings crumbled in the 1990s, the populist movement of Hugo Chávez emerged to fill the political void. This populist resurgence both capitalized on and accelerated the institutional decomposition of the old order.     

Venezuela,April 2002: Coup or Popular Rebellion? The Myth of a United Venezuela

This article assesses the merits of opposing National Assembly reports into the coup against President Chávez of Venezuela in April 2002. Looking at the historical context and the content of the reports, it argues that the two opposing accounts reflect a class division that has always existed in Venezuela but has been officially denied. It concludes that a possible exit from the stalemate could be that the opposition accept the reality of this class division and therefore the Chávez government as a legitimate representative of the popular classes. This, however, is unlikely in the present circumstances.     

The rise and fall and rise of populism in Venezuela

The article seeks to outline the main elements through which a populist political order was built in Venezuela. It will be done, first by looking at the golden years a of Venezuelan populism (1945–1948). It will be argued that the constitution of populist politics meant: an appeal to the people, the articulation of new social relations and constitution of new political identities. Then it will turn to the latter Pérez and Caldera showing the basic schemes of their governments. They sought to reconstitute politics and reshape political identities in a new populist way. The arrival of Chávez at power and the first months of his government are also analysed.     

Oil's Colonial Residues: Geopolitics,Identity, and Resistance in Venezuela

This article argues oil occupies a central role in the discursive universe of Venezuelan underdevelopment, producing anxieties of vulnerability and dependency. These anxieties are internalised and reproduced in what I describe as the coloniality of oil. Coloniality naturalises, hides, and rewrites maldevelopment – a process in which the developed world stymies growth elsewhere through the machinations of hard or soft power – as underdevelopment – a neutral category suggesting the developing world need only to catch up to the North Atlantic. Animated by the formation of new political subjectivities, the Bolivarian Revolution has attempted to break with this coloniality of oil.     

Narrowing the Gap: Explaining the Increasing Competitiveness of the Venezuelan Opposition

This article seeks to explain why electoral support for the Venezuelan opposition has increased substantially, using Venezuelan public opinion survey data from LAPOP and an opt‐in sample collected through the online vote advice application Brújula Presidencial Venezuela. It analyzes why Venezuelans who had either voted for Chávez or abstained in 2006 defected and started to support the opposition in subsequent elections. It proposes several reasons: negative voter evaluations of the economy, concern for public safety, and dissatisfaction with Venezuelan democracy. While the finding that negative policy evaluations boost support for the opposition aligns with theoretical expectations, this study finds a strong relationship between having different evaluations of the quality of democracy and supporting Chávez, which shows that the advocacy of two competing visions of democracy by the incumbent and the opposition also affects voting patterns in Venezuela.     

‘Gender,Neoliberalism, and the Venezuelan Migrant Crisis’: Female Migrants' Informal Labour and Access to Services in Urban Colombia

Neoliberalism, informality, and migration are all inextricably linked and the Venezuelan migration crisis has certain implications for women. While extensive post-neoliberal spending programmes under Chávez served to reverse the feminisation of poverty, millions of Venezuelans have migrated in recent years due to a severe economic crisis. Oral history testimonies highlight how female Venezuelan migrants in neoliberal Colombia often have no choice but to engage in precarious informal earning strategies and also experience reduced access to public services, which can substantially increase their domestic labour and outgoings. In many ways they are better off in Venezuela, thus highlighting how neoliberalism exacerbates gender poverty in both Latin America and the Global South.     

Ideology, Institutions and Ideas: Explaining Political Change in Venezuela

This article scrutinises the links between patterns and modes of political participation and the emergence of Bolivarianism in Venezuela in the early 1990s. I study how Bolivarianism triumphed over competing projects in a period characterised by widespread unrest and its relationship to the Punto-Fijo institutional structure it overthrew. I argue that the ideas of Bolivarianism are derived from contradictions inherent to the existing institutions, and can only be understood in relation to the values and practices embedded in them, which Bolivarianism aimed to replace.     

‘Reading the ads in al-Daʿwa magazine: commercialism and Islamist activism in al-Sadat’s Egypt’

ABSTRACT

This article probes the return of the Muslim Brotherhood to prominence in 1970s Egypt through a systematic analysis of advertisements in the organization’s flagship periodical, al-Da?wa (The Call). In every issue of the magazine, which was published between June 1976 and October 1981, entreaties to proper conduct and appeals to Islamic solidarity appeared alongside advertisements for everything from Pepsi to breakfast biscuits to automobiles. We utilize the methodological insights of social and cultural historians to the value of advertisements to cast new light on the reconstruction of the Brotherhood, its relationship with the diverse institutions comprising the Egyptian state, and on how the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision of piety both reflected and challenged a changing economic reality. Moving beyond a story of the Brotherhood’s return as a product of independent Islamist enterprise that had emerged due to both the Gulf oil boom and Egypt’s economic liberalization programme, significant public sector advertising in al-Da?wa, especially prominent across the most valuable advertising real estate, underscores both internal divisions within the Egyptian state as well as the tangible ways that various state institutions were patrons of religious change.     

The fractured state in the governance of private game farming: the case of KwaZulu-Natal Province,South Africa

Conversion from livestock and/or crop farming to game farming has been a notable trend on privately owned land in South Africa over the last decades. The rapid growth of wildlife ranching is associated with an annual increase in the areas enclosed by game fences and high demand for wildlife which is being traded privately and at wildlife auctions. Key environmental, agricultural and land reform legislation has been passed since 1994 that impacts this sector, but this legislation does not provide a clear regulatory framework for the game farming industry. This article seeks to understand why game farming is thriving in a regulatory environment plagued with uncertainty. The focus is on one province, KwaZulu-Natal. It is clear that the state is not a homogeneous and monolithic entity applying itself to the regulation of the sector. There is no clear direction on the position of private game farming at the interface of environmental and agricultural regulations. The argument put forward is that the fractured state, in fact, provides space within which the game farmers are able to effectively manoeuvre and to maximise their advantages as private landowners. While game farmers may complain about strict wildlife regulation in the province, the benefits they gain from the combination of a divided state and the presence in this province of a strong, autonomous conservation body are considerable.     

Venezuela after the Caracazo: Forms of Protest in a Deinstitutionalized context

Protest has become in recent years one of the most visible features of everyday life in urban Venezuela. Since the middle eighties, but in particular after the Caracazo of 1989, the Caraqueños as well as residents of other cities of the country have had to adjust themselves to the hundreds of demonstrations that are held every year. In this article I shall present the most common forms of collective action over the last ten years, relating them to the process of deinstitutionalization that has developed during the decade. I shall discuss why extra-institutional forms of collective action of a confrontational and violent nature have spread from marginal actors to organizations that in the past had at their disposal alternative channels for presenting their complaints and demands.     

哈萨克斯坦石油精英及其对能源政策的影响

哈萨克斯坦是一个经济结构严重受制于能源经济和依靠石油寻租的油气生产国。国有大型油气公司的高级主管对该国的能源政策具有举足轻重的作用。石油精英通过与政治精英建立非正式的关系网络,不仅影响本国能源部门的发展,而且还介入政治决策和政治制度。而哈萨克斯坦普遍存在着制度的不透明性、法律的不确定性和总统决定的随意性,助长并养成了非正式政治体制的固化,加强了威权主义的趋势,并进一步鼓励寻租和腐败行为的延续。     

Strong Societies, Wed Parties: Regime Change in Cuba and Venzula in the 1950s and Today

The literature on the origins of democratic institutions is split between bottom‐up and top‐down approaches. The former emphasize societal factors that press for democracy; the latter, rules and institutions that shape elites' incentives. Can these approaches be reconciled? This article proposes competitive political parties, more so than degrees of modernization and associationalism, as the link between the two. Competitive political parties enhance society's bargaining power with the state and show dominant elites that liberalization is in their best interest; the parties are thus effective conduits of democracy. In the context of party deficit, the prospects for democratization or redemocratization are slim. This is illustrated by comparing Cuba and Venezuela in the 1950s and 1330s.     

Contesting Mestizaje: Black Politics and Oral Traditions in Venezuela

Afro-descendant oral traditions are powerful modes of political expression that disrupt anti-black logics within Latin America's mestizaje. Scholarship on Afro-Latin American anti-racist mobilisation centres on large-scale, collective action. Instead, in this article, I examine songs and décimas, central forms of Afro-descendant cultural subjectivity. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in La Guaira state, Venezuela, I show how oral traditions are place-based forms of resistance against anti-black racism. This research calls on scholars to attend to oral traditions and their geographies as a tool of anti-racist political mobilisation.