Opposition politics in Malawi: hopeful signs amid the warnings

Across Africa, governments are either peacefully and legitimately ousted, or forced to share power, through the ballot box. In Malawi, the emergence of many political parties since the advent of a multiparty dispensation in 1993 signalled the flourishing of pluralism and opposition politics. However, in the May 2009 elections, the Malawi Congress Party and the United Democratic Front, which constituted the opposition, were largely rejected by the electorate in favour of President Bingu Mutharika's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), credited for his sound economic policies emulated internationally. The reduced presence in parliament of parties outside of the Democratic Progressive Party coalition is troubling. This development has stimulated debate on the opposition's role and ability to defend democratic governance, and the challenges facing it. On the other hand, the DPP's landslide victory has to some degree demonstrated that it is possible to ‘de-regionalise’ and ‘de-ethinicise’ the configuration and alignment of political interests and forces, confirming for other African countries that the analysis of African politics need not be oversimplified into ethnic and cultural terms as is often the case. This paper contends that democratic governance is promoted by a credible opposition that effectively acts as an alternative government. Therefore, there is need for addressing the major factors that militate against its operations to enable it play its rightful role in Malawi's emerging democracy.     

The East Timor Conflict and Western response

Abstract

East Timor is a former Portuguese colony that was invaded and occupied by its neighbor Indonesia in December 1975. Since then the native population has been fighting the occupation under the leadership of Fretilin, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor, and to this day the struggle continues.     

Unveiling the Third Force: Toward Transitional Justice in the USA and South Africa, 1973–1994

This study compares the American and South African security responses to perceived communist-inspired insurgencies—the American Indian Movement in the USA and the United Democratic Front/African National Congress in South Africa. In each instance, the governments employed third force techniques by utilizing surrogates, informants, provocateurs, and hit squads. As a result, these official entities became complicit in the criminal political violence that ravaged the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Rand townships between 1973 and 1994. This study also examines how investigative commissions in each country endeavored to expose official misconduct and hold these agencies accountable for their actions. Despite the differences in the scale of each insurgency as well as the overall purpose of each counterinsurgency campaign, this article finds common ground in the rationale, implementation, and effects of the security responses in each country.     

Programmed to Fail? Development Projects and the Politics of Participation

The Eastern India Rainfed Farming Project is in many respects a model development project. A joint venture of the governments of India and the UK, the EIRFP has been successful in improving farm-based livelihoods in Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal. But the Project might yet be considered a failure. It has not persuaded the poorest villagers in Jharkhand (our study area) to join or manage the self-help groups that are called for by the Project's Logical Framework. We show why this has been the case, and why such an outcome was entirely predictable. Development projects cannot be expected to change local systems of politics or stratification. But this does not mean that the EIRFP is a failure. It means that a development project will be destined to 'fail' when it is judged against unrealistic assumptions about the possibilities and merits of 'participation'.     

Privatising the war on drugs

A defining feature of the ‘9/11 wars’ has been the prominent role played by private military and security companies (pmsc). The growth of this market for military and security services has not gone unnoticed. Yet the role pmsc have played in supporting the US-led war on drugs has largely gone under the radar, both literally and figuratively. The aim of this article is to look at the activities of pmsc funded by the USA in Latin America, and to consider the specific consequences that arise from employing them in the field of counter-narcotics. It is argued that the use of pmsc further entrenches a costly and unsuccessful way of dealing with drugs. There is a need to move from a strict prohibitionist stance and consider alternatives to the war on drugs approach, but the use of pmsc creates another strong vested interest in maintaining an increasingly problematic and costly status quo.     

The Trials of Henry Kissinger,written, directed,and produced by Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki, 2002. Running time: 80 minutes. Available from Jigsaw Productions. Web site: www.thetrialsofhenrykissinger.com.

Using data from the 2008 and 2009 Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the United States Census Bureau, this article assesses the year-over-year change in the civic engagement of citizens in America's largest metropolitan areas. Of special interest are Denver and Seattle, where the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed during the intervening year. The data from the CPS indicate that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009—a decline that is not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper. The analysis suggests that this decline may plausibly be attributed to the newspaper closures in Seattle and Denver. This short-term negative effect is concerning, and whether it lasts warrants future attention.     

Reassessing the Role of Civil Society Organizations in the Transition to Democracy in Spain

Spain's democratization process has mainly been described as a settlement between political elites in which civil society organizations played little part. Yet the literature on Eastern European democratization sets great store by the role of civil society, both for transition and consolidation. Does this different treatment reflect the approach adopted by analysts or the actual contrasting presence of civil society organizations in the relevant periods? The question prompts this re-examination of the role of civil society organizations in the Spanish transition. It finds that the answer depends in part on definitions of civil society, but mainly on the approach taken by authors in presenting their accounts. It finds that the elite settlement perspective silences or removes agency from the Spanish civil society organizations active in the transition.

An alternative view is developed through an in-depth review of the events following the death of the dictator General Franco in 1975 and a textual analysis of Spain's actual definitive settlement, the 1978 Constitution. The research demonstrates that civil society organizations were responsible for disrupting the dictatorship's intention to maintain an authoritarian regime, leaving it no option but to negotiate with civil society organizations such as political parties and trade unions, which were pursuing their own strategic goals towards co-construction of a socially advanced democracy. The article's approach bridges the gulf between top-down and bottom-up accounts of political change in Spain at the end of the Franco regime.     

Parallel authoritarian powers: an explanation of Mexico’s authoritarian regime breakdown

Regional multilateral regimes have become important instruments for promoting and defending democracy around the world. The novel nature of these regional instruments has generated a cottage industry in social science scholarship. Yet, none of these works compare the democracy promotion and defence regimes of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (AU). This article is designed to fill this gap. We argue that the unique constellation of actors that are members of each respective organization have reinforced two distinct democracy promotion and defence paths. The state-driven regime evolution characteristic of the Americas contrasts with Africa's expert-driven process of regime construction. The state-centric process of the OAS regime has bolstered a narrow interstate multilateralism that upholds traditional sovereign state prerogatives and minimizes the role for non-state actors in the promotion and defence of democracy in the Americas. The expert-driven process of AU's regime construction has fostered a legalistic approach to democratic promotion and defence in Africa and opened up space for non-state actors to play a central role in the development of regional democracy promotion and defence norms.     

The puzzle of populism in Iran’s electoral politics

The article examines the impact of an unsettled electoral market and evolving political predispositions on the rise and fall of populism in Iran. The article argues that the absence of a polarized electoral contest between reformists and conservatives paved the way for the victory of the populist candidate in the 2005 presidential election in Iran, while the deep economic recession resulting from conservative administration policies created a long-term political experience which influenced voters and led to the victory of the pragmatist candidate in the 2013 and 2017 elections. Quantitative analysis indicates that in the 2005 election, the struggle between conservatives and reformists did not impact the competition between candidates, and consequently depoliticized attitudes, for example distributive demands, ideology, and anti-ruling elite sentiment gained significance, whereas polarization between conservatives and a coalition of reformists and pragmatists enhanced the role of partisanship and triggered the fall of populism in the 2013 election.