Promoting Democracy. Manal A. Jamal

1989, the Salvadoran government and the FMLN had reached a military stalemate with no clear victors.78 As a result, both parties agreed to a negotiated settlement. The Salvadoran agreements built consensus on the different issues and culminated in a comprehensive final framework agreement that included agreements reached over the preceding two years. In contrast to the Oslo Accords, the Salvadoran peace accords enjoyed high levels of political inclusion and societal support. Although groups such as the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats did not sit at the negotiating table, they were part of the Inter-Party Commission that endorsed the accords and were not marginalized by the terms of the agreement. Had these parties opposed the accords and been excluded as a result, similar polarization dynamics as in the Palestinian case would have transpired despite the variation in conflict type or extent of UN involvement. The conclusion of the Salvadoran civil war became known as the “negotiated revolution.”79

      Relatedly, some may argue that a key distinguishing feature that led to the divergent outcomes was the “settledness” or the extent to which the conflicts have been settled in these two cases. Democracy promotion will be a smoother process in more settled cases, and Anna Jarstad and Timothy Sisk’s recommendation that it is better to settle a conflict and then promote democracy certainly applies here.80 Regardless of the settledness of a conflict, however, democracy promotion in noninclusive contexts will exacerbate polarization and undermine the longer term prospects for democratization.

      More restrictive security environments and limited governmental support conceivably could also account for different civil society outcomes. Most notably, the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 and the continuation of Israel’s encroachments against the Palestinian territories may have further challenged civil society institutions, resulting in different trajectories. These factors alone, however, do not explain variation within a case, or the underlying rationale for governments or other dominant groups to favor one group over another. The Palestinian case had experienced a restrictive security environment prior to the Oslo Accords, and this did not prevent political mass-based mobilization. Moreover, such factors do not explain why cases also experiencing societal insecurity related to crime and poverty may undergo more constructive civil society developments, as in El Salvador.

      In chapter 7, I examine Iraq and South Africa. This examination departs from our standard two-by-two analysis that seeks to show the impact of my key explanatory factor in the absence of mediating factors. Such a treatment is not possible given that almost every country in the world is or has been a recipient of some form of democracy promotion assistance in the post–Cold War era. In both cases, however, associational life emerged from the political organizations of the pretransition period, yet we see divergent outcomes in the transition period. In Iraq, as a result of the noninclusive settlement, almost all institutions affiliated to the former ruling Baʿath Party were marginalized in the transition, and Western democracy promotion efforts worked to exclude all former affiliated associations and promote nonaffiliates, further exacerbating the ensuing polarization. Alternatively, in South Africa, the political settlement ensured that all political organizations and their affiliated institutions would be included in the transition. Democracy promotion efforts worked to facilitate this inclusion, and thus we witness the emergence of a much more coherent civil society and democratic development process.

      Assessing the Quality of Civil Society and Democratic Development

      Although the breadth of citizenship in a society is a useful indicator for gauging the quality of civil society and democracy in a given polity,81 a sole focus on rights does not tell us much about how broader changes affect the exercise of democracy. To this end, this study focuses on democratic outcomes, including changes in civil society. Pertaining to democratic outcomes, I assessed presidential, legislative, and local elections, focusing on the impact of timing, frequency, and the laws that govern these elections. I assessed changes in civil society by tracing how the mass-based organizations, and specifically women’s mass-based organizations, were reconstituted after the start of the conflict to peace transitions, and how access to funding, including Western donor assistance, shaped these processes. I studied the impact of the political settlement by determining which organizations and individuals could access Western donor funding depending on their position vis-à-vis the peace accords. Then I examined the patterns of interaction that transpired between the different tendencies, paying particular attention to the degree to which the relationship is horizontal versus vertical, and the degree of cooperation and polarization. I assessed the extent of horizontal linkages and cooperation between the professionalized NGOs by examining the number of cooperative meetings, joint programs, and coordinating mechanisms in which they participated. I assessed the quality of horizontal linkages between the professionalized NGOs and mass-based groups by examining the extent of incorporation and interaction that went beyond simply service provision. Throughout, I compared these dynamics to the presettlement period, the period before the peace accords. My examination also focused on the accessibility of the state to different women’s groups, and the ability of different tendencies of the women’s movement to make representative demands on the state at both the local and national levels. To this end, I also examined the extent of meetings and interactions between activists of the women’s sector and local and legislative government representatives.

      I assessed these patterns by examining all the women’s sector programs of the professionalized NGOs and grassroots organizations in the Ramallah and San Salvador areas. This examination included the careful screening of 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