Regime Transitions, Anti-Dictatorship Struggles, and the Future of Protest in Democratizing

Dear Colleagues,

This paper comes out of a conference I attended in the spring, and is very rough and preliminary. In the original, I was asked to do a comparison of Philippine and Indonesian transitions, but most others at the conference were reflecting on the Arab spring, and as the conversation progressed, we decided that my paper should try to do that as well. But the task was to write about Southeast Asia in ways that allowed me to pull lessons for the analysis of the Arab Spring, and in particular to suggest things that analysts should look for. That means I needed to develop a more lesson-seeking approach to my subject matter, and I’ve tried to do that here. This is my first attempt to actually work with the dynamics of contention framework, and though I’m not happy with this draft, I’m closer than when I started. I’d be grateful for any comments or criticism you may have.

Still, in key ways, this is a paper that promises more than it delivers, and that mainly reflects where I am in the writing phase—smack in the middle of it. What it does not deliver, though promises in how I’ve advertised and introduced it, is a gleaning of lessons from my Southeast Asian cases for application to those in the Middle East and North Africa. I have some lessons and most now think in systematic ways about Arab Spring, and do some readings. As I revise this, I expect the Southeast Asia section to shrink and the applications to… section to expand.

So, in short, thank you for reading this very preliminary draft.

Vince

Regime Transitions, Anti-dictatorship Struggles, and the Future of Protest in Democratizing Settings

Vince Boudreau

The City College of New York

The “dynamics of contention” research program (DOC) contributed significantly to the study of social movements and protest in many ways, among them by indicating how we might appreciate and grapple analytically with contingency. That capacity has had wide implications, and promises powerful benefits in the analysis of what many call democracy movements. Two particular benefits emerge most clearly. First, in ways that theorists of revolutions would appreciate, the DOC program revises earlier tendencies to see upsurges in struggle, from their very inception, in ways defined by their ends. Mobilization processes are contingent phenomena with a variety of endpoints, and can turn on any number of critical junctures (before which turning, we cannot really describe the action on the street as revolutionary, democratic or reformist). Democracy may not be a defining objective of so-called democracy struggles, but something that emerges from the interaction of people interested in a whole range of different things—in state power, in revenge, in avoiding arrest, in ending human rights violations. Democracy and democratization may be an established movement goal from the outset, or a kind of settling point that all agree upon, at least provisionally, over the course of struggle. Democracy can be a way of framing several entirely different political programs.

If democracy is a contingent, rather than inherent objective of struggle, it probably require analysis in light of on-going, historically rooted contentious processes—and the pattern of democratic consolidation (that most optimistic phrasing) require the attention of contentious politics specialists no less than that of democracy theorists. A host of questions follow. If democracy movements do not always begin in the search for democracy, what happens to other interests or orientations mobilized into the struggle? After the transition, do all activists accommodate themselves to new political rules and objectives, and if so, with what consequences? Will revolutionaries still pursue state overthrow? What factors influence movement trajectories in the new dispensations? In unlocking the role that contentious politics plays in democratic transitions, one needs to look both backwards and forwards from the transitional moment to identify how patterns of struggle carry forward to eventually help define relationships between a citizenry and the new system’s emerging institutions.

What of the new system itself? Have conceptualizations of democracy helped or hindered our understanding of how social movements interact with emergent democratic or hybrid regimes? Many describe democracy, once established, as a naturally preferred and so politically inevitable system, hampered in the end by mainly coordination and communication problems. Others see it as mainly self-regulating, designed around processes that domesticate recalcitrants toward political moderation via electoral competition. But the idea of democracy as an automatically stable resting place is a thin fiction, primarily because it treats threats to democracy as exogenous to the democratic process. Accordingly, theorists (particularly those writing for a policy audience) caution against a hard-line backlash, but imagine that democratic procedures, properly organized, would cool passions and resolve conflict. Guided by such assumptions, democratization efforts often impatiently pursue early elections and the construction of strong civil society organizations, even in hotly contested post-conflict settings..

These core policy programs of the democratization agenda contain glimpses of some suppressed assumptions about what motivates activists: a desire for a fair political system, demands that core rights be protected, and some interest in transitional justice. But if all manner of activists find themselves in democracy struggles, and the relationship between activists and democratizing goals is a contingent one, we should concentrate our inquiries around questions that get at that contingency, examining how differently positioned activists engage processes of struggle against authoritarian regimes, how processes of struggle influence activist collectives, and how the movement emerges into the new dispensation and interacts with the emerging political order. For the purposes of such inquiry, we should, in particular, operationalize a conception of democracy as a mode of political competition, rather than as a system that delivers stability, or justice or something else. We must then ask how activists, in the particular social formations in which we find them, are likely to engage that mode of competition (in the particular institutional formations that they find it.). What relationship, in particular, will emerge between demands that establish the parameters of politics—the new rules and institutions that are the architectural substance of a democratization process—and the content of politics: the content of policy, the allocation of resources, and the new dispensation’s distribution of power and voice?

A significant number of analysts set out to explain transitions to democracy as if social movements were more or less epiphenomenal to a process driven by elite realignment, defection, and contestation. Even when democratization theorists bring mass mobilization back in, they often treat it as a contributing factor to elite efforts. Social movement theorists, in contrast, more often ask about factors that allow movements to “succeed” of their democratizing objectives. What would an approach that marries the two perspectives look like? It would, I think, seek to explain the relationships between the mobilization processes that create pro-democracy activists and processes of regime fragmentation that create democracy advocates with some sort consequential institutional positioning. In analyzing that relationship, it would examine the character of interests and social relationships brokered into movement formations, and find out what happens to them. It would, in short, acknowledge the centrality of how social movement stand in the larger transition process, and make the relationship between democratization and other movement programs an explicit object of study.

This paper attempts to develop an approach to these questions. In it, I begin with some broad brush reflections on two Southeast Asian cases that I know quite well (Indonesia and the Philippines) and attempt to tease from them more general questions about the relationship between political contention, regime transitions and post-transition dynamics. I then pivot from those Southeast Asian cases to consider some broader and more general theoretical propositions suggested by these cases, with, it must be admitted up front, some largely superficial references to the transitions in North Africa and the Middle East. In executing this turn, my objective is less to answer questions than to raise them, and to call attention to some important lines of comparison between the MENA cases and those in Southeast Asia. I begin to theorize the post-transition contention by establishing the different ways in which they were situated in situating it in what may also have been very different anti-dictatorship struggles, transition processes, and emergent institutional settings.

In the abridged account, I am most interested in calling attention to what I hope is a useful distinction in what democratization is, and to show how two elements of the process interact differently in the two cases. I argue for the analytical utility of looking at democratization processes, and the interaction of activists with that process, in terms of efforts to: 1) write new political rules and 2) use those rules in substantive competition over resources and opportunities. Of the first question, I will be concerned with how participatory and sustained the process was. Of the second, I will examine how dynamics of political competition change activists and the social relationships in which they are embedded. In relationship to how both play out, I will examine two political dynamics closely associated with the DOCs program: polarization and brokerage, because both seem to have consequences for how legacies of struggle are transmitted to post-transition politics. I use reflections on these dynamics to ask both how activists influence the movement toward or away from democracy, and how the shifting terrain of a regime in transition influences activism and social movements.

In order to set up this investigation, I begin by constructing two very stylized accounts of the Indonesian and Philippine transitions, designed to draw attention to several of their key features. I’ll describe these features in more detail below, but their core elements include the following: how stable and comprehensive, and diverse were anti-dictatorship movement social relationships? How were these different strands (in cases where there was diversity) pulled together—that is, how did brokerage operate in that process? How did the transitional process reinforce or disrupt those relationships, and what was the relationship between efforts to write, and to use new political rules? Finally, what patterns characterize activists’ engagement of participatory institutions? Many social movement accounts are primarily interested in establishing how mobilization process occurred and what contention looked like. I am most interested in establishing how mobilization, struggle and regime transition influences how activists position themselves in the new regime, and what clues that position may hold for subsequent governance. Together, these questions help illuminate whether the struggle for democracy unifies movements or fragments them, whether it divides movements from other elites actors, and how social relationships and obligations that pass through the transitional process factor into subsequent movement politics (and what that may say about contention, participation and democracy).

Dynamics of Contention in Three Arenas: The Stylized Accounts

In what follows, I adopt a path dependent approach to the two narratives, asking what legacies of past political dynamics get carried forward to influence politics after the transition. The accounts emphasize elements of contention already highlighted in this paper’s introductory pages: the weight of social relationships on movement politics, the influence of transitional contention in driving movement actors toward or away from one another, or toward or away other elite actors in the transition and beyond, and finally, the sequencing and impact of efforts to reconstruct and use new democratic processes and institutions. The accounts that follow look at three different periods in the process: the anti-dictatorship movement—with particular emphasis on the way that movement enters into the final, democracy movement phase, the transition itself, with particular emphasis on the way it reshuffles political and social relationships, and the subsequent construction of a new governing system.

1. Anti-Dictatorship Movements and Democracy Movements

Institutions of struggle that developed to resist the Marcos and Suharto dictatorships could not look more different. In the Philippines, the 1972 declaration of martial law accelerated an existing mode of social movement organization in the party-linked and state-power oriented multi-sectoral movements. Across the political spectrum, movements developed programs for national power and integrated the more finely grained programs of movement “sections” (i.e. farmers’ groups, labor unions, student or youth organizations) into that larger struggle. Movement networks were differentiated functionally, and a broad range of networks, oriented around the different points of the ideological compass, took shape. In Indonesia, with very few and limited exceptions, activists were allowed neither to organize nor to concatenate into expansive networks. Protest was therefore more ephemeral, and more closely demanded the resolution of specific problems in particular communities: that, for instance, a specific dam not be built, or a new traffic rule or toll be repealed. The reasons for these variations need not detain us at present—but lie in histories of how the dictatorship originally pushed itself onto the scene, and how its subsequent repressive policies interacted with opposition efforts. The point for the moment is that movement patterns, once established, set the stage for the imprint that subsequent contention would leave on movement institutions and practices.

1.1 The Philippines:

Several important elements constitute what we may call the Philippine anti-dictatorship movement template. First, activists built movement organizations as parts of a long term, state-replacing initiative, animated by explicit ideological commitments, and differentiated functionally, within any ideological network, and ideologically among the networks themselves. Functionally differentiated organizational sections (political leaderships, entry-level mass organizations, affiliated non-governmental organizations, and in may cases military and electoral arms) grew up along what Filipinos called sectoral lines (i.e. women, workers, students, farmers). Full time movement organizers brokered and maintained the relationships embodied in these organizations, and that brokerage occurred mainly within the formal party-movement-insurgency structure.

The dynamics of the Marcos dictatorship allowed these movement organizations to flourish. The regime conceived of itself as a modernizing political force, with a natural appeal to an emerging urban middle and upper class linked to industrial activity rather than the plantation agriculture of the traditional elite. Anti-communism and the argument that development required authoritarian control underpinned the regime’s hopes for an elite-backed constitutional authoritarianism. This strategy required the state to allow space for bounded urban protest organizations and campaigns—demonstrating to the urban middle class the arrangement’s liberal possibilities. Periodic regime crack-downs pushed these advocacy organizations toward the radical flank, re-polarizing things, and creating a close connection between armed and formally legal movement formations. In time, cycles of liberalization and crackdown contributed to the growth of a larger and larger organized anti-dictatorship apparatus, holding together a broad range of particular (what was called sectoral) movement demands within a state replacing agenda. This pattern had three consequences that are important for our present purposes. Firstmore or less formal social movement organizations developed steadily over the course of Marcos Regime. Second, from the outset, those activists had elite allies who were also displaced by Marcos, some of whom actively participated in movement activity, and other of whom would work closely with movement forces during the transitional period

1.2 Indonesia

Save for several exceptional separatist insurgencies, Indonesian activists, following the bloody elimination of the communist party in 1965-66, never developed anything resembling Philippine organizational formations, in large measure because of the regime specifically proscribed and repressed activist organizational formations. Rather, the Indonesian activist pattern contained the following main elements: First, while Philippine movement organizations were long term and formalized, containing full time organizers, Indonesian activist formations were emergent, informal and small scale. Even comparatively organized Indonesian legal aid associations never produced mass organizations, and student efforts to build non-governmental organizations avoided base building activity in favor of research, discussion and case-specific advocacy. Second, Indonesian activist organizations never developed any integrated, multi-sectoral program for governance, and never conceived of themselves as candidates to wield state power. To the extent that different activist collectives were brokered together—and for the most part they were not—the effort advanced via the efforts of public intellectuals to encourage a discourse about democracy and reform. But over the course of the Suharto regime, these connections were loose, short term, and produced very little organizationally. Indonesian activism had very little in the way of an organizational apparatus, and so very little in the way of social relationships between activists and mass constituencies.