Promoting Democracy. Manal A. Jamal

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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      The Political-Military Organizations and the Emergence of Mass-Based Grassroots СКАЧАТЬ