Democratic Regimes, Internal Security Policy and the Threat of Terrorism

Since terrorism poses a serious threat to the processes of liberal democracy governments should act decisively to curb terrorist groups. This article examines the range of political, judicial and enforcement measures available, assesses the problems associated with them and the conditions for their success. Political measures include reforms in response to popular unrest, negotiations with terrorist groups and amnesties to encourage an end to violence. Since terrorists seek to influence domestic and international public opinion, the authorities need to counter that propaganda and in particular to explain and justify the political, judicial and enforcement measures they adopt. Governments have to choose between treating terrorism like other forms of criminal behaviour or setting up special courts and passing emergency legislation, with the attendant dangers to civil liberties. Enforcement of anti-terrorist measures has quite often been inept. Coordination is required to prevent police anti-terrorist units and other security agencies from engaging in institutional rivalry. But if these agencies are efficient in their intelligence gathering, and politically supervised to ensure that they act within the law, they can be decisive in the reduction of terrorism, as in Western Europe at the end of the 1970s.     

Making democracy safe: Policies tackling electoral violence in Africa

This article analyses the ways in which African countries are grappling with the problem of electoral violence. It argues that, although electoral violence has posed a serious challenge to democratic consolidation and peace in Africa, knowledge of how to prevent and or manage it is largely inadequate. Much of the academic interest in electoral violence has focused on defining the phenomenon, particularly analysing its causes, scope, patterns and consequences. This article examines the measures adopted by Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria to manage electoral violence. The specific measures analysed in this study include: (1) establishment of commissions of inquiry; (2) mediation in high-tension situations; and (3) regulation of political activities. While these measures represent significant efforts to curb electoral violence in Africa, they do not, of course, directly address the underlying causes of the problem. Electoral violence will continue to pose serious challenges to democracy and peace in Africa until the lingering socio-economic and political tensions and the lack of credibility of the electoral process in many African countries are addressed; however, in the meantime, to save lives, it is worth putting into place effective deterrents to election violence wherever it threatens.     

Acute and Everyday Violence in Sri Lanka

Police torture in Sri Lanka has been subject to extensive investigation and condemnation but remains a widespread and seemingly entrenched practice. Seeking to understand the resistance of such practices to existing interventions, this article locates the police’s use of torture within a broader geography of social violence in Sri Lanka. We discuss the findings of extensive fieldwork conducted in the north-west of Sri Lanka where we examined not only police behaviour and interactions between police and the broader community but also the social dynamics relationships more generally. One significant finding was that violence against certain types of people, including police use of torture against such people, is generally accepted, even as the police are broadly criticised in the community for their unethical and ineffective behaviour. Another significant finding was that the society is riven with social hierarchies and that patterns of domination are embedded in social, political and symbolic systems. We conclude that police torture needs to be understood against the background of broader cultural practices whereby social subjects are disciplined and policed to produce appropriate citizens and punish social boundary violations.     

Kenya's political ‘transition’ through the eyes of its ‘foot soldiers’ for democracy and human rights (1997–2012)

This is a study of young human rights activists who provide a unique window on Kenya's recent and turbulent political history (1997–2012). The period includes the end of authoritarian rule and election of a ‘reform’ government in 2002 that expanded some human rights but abused others. Based on archival materials and periodic, multiple interviews by the author with key youth activists, the findings make three contributions to the study of human rights and democracy. First, it identifies the often overlooked role of secondary level activists in a human rights/democracy social movement, the so-called ‘foot soldiers’. Second, it explores the failure of Kenya to consolidate its democracy and quell police violence, including the assassination of two human rights investigators, an event which sent a chill through the activist community. Third, by tracing the trajectory of some ‘foot soldiers’ during this period, the study confirms a theory of a cycle of social movement activism but suggests modifications.     

Violence,displacement and democracy in post-conflict societies: evidence from Mali

This article examines the political crisis in Mali, 2012–2013, to test the impact of violent conflict on public attitudes to democracy. In post-conflict situations, democracy building depends on interim steps to restore trust among citizens and to address national reconciliation and transitional justice. According to the results of a custom-designed opinion survey, recent experiences of violence and displacement in Mali have undermined both interpersonal and interethnic trust as well as public confidence that elected governments can resolve national conflicts. While internal displacement is frequently accompanied by violence against property, violence against persons increases popular demand for a retributive brand of transitional justice. Nonetheless, the Malian experience suggests that citizens in post-conflict societies – including those displaced from their homes – still yearn to live in a peaceful and unified country and have not abandoned a widespread preference for democracy.     

State Discourses, Police Violence and Democratisation in Argentina

Police violence is a persistent problem throughout Latin America despite the return of electoral democracy; it is pervasive and includes torture, murder and disappearances. Certainly institutional reforms aimed at changing police practice are important. However, it is equally important that state actors maintain a clear and relatively consistent discourse in favour of democratic policing. This article argues that, in the case of Argentina, state actors do not maintain a consistent position in favour of democratic policing and instead oscillate between denying the occurrence of police violence, justifying such police action and absolving themselves of responsibility.     

Dying to win: Elections,political violence,and institutional decay in Kenya

This paper examines the lessons learned from Kenya's 2007 post election violence and what has happened since then. It notes that the root causes of the violence still persist, have not been addressed, and easily could be reignited. Faced with a situation where institutions and the rule of law have been weakened deliberately and where diffused violence is widespread, both Kenya's transition to democracy and the fate of the nation remain vulnerable. The argument here is that the problems faced in holding and managing elections in conflict situations often are not simply technical. Instead, in Kenya and elsewhere, many difficulties are symptomatic of larger political and institutional questions related to democratic change that are more difficult to analyze in causal terms or to address.     

Excessive Use of Deadly Force by Police in the Philippines Before Duterte

ABSTRACT

Under President Duterte the Philippine National Police have killed several thousand suspects in so-called legitimate encounters. While this has engendered much media attention and scientific research, earlier police violence is still a black-box in many respects. This article provides at least a partial filling of this void. It establishes several indicators for measuring lethal police violence. Moreover, it presents a detailed mapping of regional and sub-regional patterns of armed police encounters for the decade from 2006 to 2015. The spatial and temporal comparisons show that even though actual levels of deadly police violence have been quite low in several Philippine provinces and cities, the Philippine National Police almost always shot to kill suspects and not to incapacitate them. While there was significant variation over time and between sub-national units, neither the magnitude nor the levels of lethality of the violence are related to the threat levels to which the police officers were exposed.     

Indigenous Parties and Democracy in Latin America

In recent years, important indigenous parties have emerged for the first time in Latin American history. Although some analysts view this development with trepidation, this essay argues that the indigenous parties in Latin America are unlikely to exacerbate ethnic conflict or create the kinds of problems that have been associated with some ethnic parties in other regions. To the contrary, the emergence of major indigenous parties in Latin America may actually help deepen democracy in the region. These parties will certainly improve the representativeness of the party system in the countries where they arise. They should also increase political participation and reduce party system fragmentation and electoral volatility in indigenous areas. They may even increase the acceptance of democracy and reduce political violence in countries with large indigenous populations.     

Undermining the Rule of Law: Democratization and the Dark Side of Police Reform in Mexico

This article asks whether democratization, under certain historical conditions, may relate to the deteriorating rule of law. Focusing on Mexico City, where police corruption is significant, this study argues that the institutionalized legacies of police power inherited from Mexico's one-party system have severely constrained its newly democratic state's efforts to reform the police. Mexico's democratic transition has created an environment of partisan competition that, combined with decentralization of the state and fragmentation of its coercive and administrative apparatus, exacerbates intrastate and bureaucratic conflicts. These factors prevent the government from reforming the police sufficiently to guarantee public security and earn citizen trust, even as the same factors reduce capacity, legitimacy, and citizen confidence in both the police and the democratically elected state. This article suggests that when democracy serves to undermine rather than strengthen the rule of law, more democracy can actually diminish democracy and its quality.     

A British ‘Foreign Legion’? The British Police in Mandate Palestine

The men of the British section of the Palestine police have romantically imagined their time as officers in Mandate Palestine, a land infused with historical and biblical significance. Many compared their service to that of the famed military force, the French Foreign Legion. This study sets the nostalgia of memory against the reality of service in Palestine, one that involved considerable brutality against local people. This essay details the empirical evidence of violence, including torture and a ‘dirty war’, mining archival sources, contextualizing primary source material within wider notions of British ideas of collective punishment within the empire. The Palestine police failed in its job of policing, necessitating the deployment of the army to Palestine, and with this collapse in police control the force became more violent. Ironically, the reality of life in the Palestine police was similar to that in the French Foreign Legion: a shock force there to maintain imperial control. The article argues that policing methods from the Mandate period continued after the Palestine force was disbanded in 1948, both within Israel and in other parts of the British Empire where demobilized Palestine police officers went to serve. It pushes the current paradigm on policing, extending the literature that details reforms and institutional change in the Palestine police to include the impact on local people.     

Memoria y democracia. Una relación incierta

This paper begins with a series of findings on the increasing focus on the memories of the recent past, particularly in societies that have undergone periods of political violence, dictatorships and civil wars. In analysing the moment of installation of the institutional, territorial and symbolic marks (understood as expressions produced by various actors and state policies and social movements that respond to the demands of these social actors), one can see how memories of the recent past, suffering and political violence act as stimuli for countless rituals, cultural productions, and a search for interpretations and explanations. This paper seeks to question some of the basic assumptions and basic innuendos implicit in the “duty of memory”: an exploration of the relationship between memory and justice, between memory and democracy, and between preservation-preservation and transmission. By analysing these relationships, this paper aims to relocate memories in the context of broader and longer-lasting structures and social processes; centrally linked to the persistence of multiple social inequalities and the relationship between memory and political present. To do this, some institutional state processes are analysed, both at the symbolic level and in the field of education and transmission, in order to present some situations that allow the task of rethinking and raising further questions about the relationship between memory and democracy.     

Untangling Social and Political Capital in Latin American Democracies

Robert Putnam extolled the virtue of social capital by arguing that social networks, civil society, and trust contribute to democracy. Subsequent research, however, identified a weakness in the social capital “model” in its underspecification of the mechanisms by which social capital affects political systems. This article proposes the concept of political capital as a likely product of social capital that links civil society participants to the political system. The article tests this two‐stage model of social capital and political capital and their effects on democratization using survey data from eight Latin American nations. Results find that civil society engagement in 2004 affected political capital variables, which, in turn, had positive effects on system‐level democracy measures in 2010. The article thus shows that political capital serves as an intervening variable between social capital and democracy and democratization.     

Political support through representation by the government. Evidence from Dutch panel data

Research on political support demonstrates that satisfaction with democracy is higher among electoral winners than losers, and that it is higher for citizens who are ideologically more congruent with the government. In this paper, I analyze how support for the political system is affected by representation by the government. Expanding on previous studies, I leverage long-run panel data from the Dutch LISS panel spanning over several electoral cycles. Drawing on various measures that go beyond the distinction between election winners and losers and also measure how close citizens are to the government coalition as a whole, I show that being well represented by the government has a wide-ranging positive relationship with satisfaction with democracy, external efficacy and trust in political institutions. While this relationship is mostly short-run, political support can decline substantially if non-representation persists in the long-run. This highlights the relevance of long-run panel data for studying the consequences of representation.     

Ironic political reforms: elected senators,party-list MPs,and family rule in Thailand

ABSTRACT

An elected Senate and the party-list system are two institutional innovations of the 1997 Thai Constitution designed to support political reforms. This paper sheds light on one unintended effect of these reforms: they have allowed scores of political families to maintain or even tighten their grip on Parliament. Combining aggregate data and case studies, this paper shows that a sizable number of elected senators and party-list parliamentary members are related, by birth or marriage, to other parliament members elected in the post-1932 period. The well-intended reforms have concentrated parliamentary power in the hands of these families, many of which represent the excesses of Thailand’s full-blown electoral democracy. The survival and resilience of these families diminish reform opportunities by further entrenching corruption, clientelism, violence, and electoral fraud, as well as by deepening dynastic rule that militates against political pluralism and inclusiveness.     

Barking or biting? Media and parliamentary investigation of right‐wing extremism in the Bundeswehr

Over the winter of 1997–98 Germany was rocked by a series of investigative media reports over right‐wing extremist incidents within its armed forces, painting a disturbing picture of racist violence and neo‐Nazi sympathies in the Bundeswehr. In response to the media reports and the ensuing public outcry, the Bundestag instituted a Committee of Investigation over political extremism in the Bundeswehr. The Committee concluded that, despite the severity of the some of the incidents investigated, most were initiated by extremist individuals who sought to use their military service to further their political goals, but it found no evidence of widespread right‐wing trends within the ranks. This affair proved the value of Germany's wide media freedoms as an inherent element in the stability of the German democracy and enhanced the ‘public watchdog’ function of the German media.     

Issue framing and electoral violence in Ghana: a conceptual analysis

Ghana has conducted several successful elections since 1992, but the country continues to face many threats of widespread violence due to the recurrent nature of micro-level electoral violence and the existence of vulnerabilities such as political patronage, politics of exclusion, winner-takes-all electoral system and ethnic cleavages. While these factors have been used to explain the causes of electoral violence, issue framing by political elites and its connection to electoral violence have not been adequately examined. To better understand this phenomenon, this article draws on the concept of framing to underscore the argument that issue framing and reframing by political elites tend to shape micro-level electoral violence in Ghana.     

Low Intensity Democracies: Latin America in the Post-dictatorial Era

In the context of the Cold War and accompanied by the doctrines of National Security, authoritarian and often repressive military or civil-military regimes emerged in a number of Latin American countries. However, military regimes were not the only ones contributing to the formation of societies mutilated by fear and terror. During the last four decades, the continent became affected by a cycle of violence that involved various armed actors, from the armed forces to the guerrilla, from the paramilitaries to the narcotics-trafficking Mafia, or from the committees of self-defence to the 'common' criminals. This article focuses on the persistence of military influence and organised political violence more general in post-authoritarian and indeed post-Cold War Latin America. After briefly reviewing the historical legacy of so-called 'political armies' in the region as a whole, I offer an assessment of the consequences of this legacy for the current agenda of democratic consolidation in Latin America. Two possible scenarios are examined: that of fairly progressive democratisation and civilianisation of politics, and that of the re-emergence of violence despite the formal rule of democracy. In the latter scenario, de facto harsh and violent regimes collide with a growing array of rival perpetrators of political and other forms of organised violence.     

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.     

Rethinking Police Violence in Brazil: Unmasking the Public Secret of Race

In Brazilian cities, perhaps the most disturbing criminal activity is the violence perpetrated by police officers themselves. This article is an invitation and a provocation to reconsider social scientific thinking about police violence in Brazil. Illustrated by a court decision from a Northeastern city, in which a black man won a case against the state for being falsely arrested and abused by a black police officer on the grounds of racism, this article investigates three paradoxes: Brazilians fear both crime and the police; black police beat black civilians; and government officials disavow responsibility by stigmatizing the police on racial grounds. It then proposes an alternative reading of these paradoxes that opens the possibility for rethinking police reform and argues that democratization in Brazil is deeply intertwined with the future of its darkest‐skinned citizens.