Promoting Democracy. Manal A. Jamal

did not ask for an award, and refused to take the US$200 I had initially offered. Instead, we drank tea with mint and exchanged information about common acquaintances.

      The men informed me that I was very lucky because the owner of the “chop shop” to which my car had been sent was committed to a “nationalist policy” and would only buy stolen cars previously owned by Israelis. Since my case was one of mistaken identity, the partly stripped car would be returned to me. To ensure that there were no hard feelings, they suggested that I should meet with the owner of the chop shop and the young men who took the car, and that they would then apologize to me directly.

      Mohammed knew an old woman in the village, so we agreed to meet the young men at her house. When we arrived, the house was dark because the electricity had been cut. I was perplexed, to say the least, and trying to absorb all that had happened. The car’s theft and imminent return were no longer the focus of my attention. I was struck by the realization that there were villages in the West Bank that did not have continuous access to electricity. Here I was in a village that had not been touched by any post-Oslo development projects, let alone any promises of future development or reconstruction projects.3 The West Bank central region of Jerusalem-Ramallah of the 1970s and 1980s had been more developed than this village now in the late 1990s. Many of the activists in this village were associated with a political organization that opposed the Oslo Accords, and I wondered if this was one of the reasons that explained this inequitable state.

      The young men finally arrived. They entered the room and timidly offered their apologies, explaining that I had been mistaken for an Israeli Jew. Mohammed and I countered that mistaken identity did not make stealing any more legitimate. The owner of the chop shop laughed and rationalized that stealing cars was now one of their only means of continuing their nationalist resistance against the Israeli occupation. Prior to the Oslo Accords, they were all political activists, affiliated with one of the major leftist political factions. The owner of the chop shop had spent five years in jail between the ages of 13 and 20 for grassroots political organizing, and the other thieves shared similar backgrounds. He went on to explain that, after the 1993 Oslo Accords, they found themselves abandoned by the leadership of the political opposition, and increasingly marginal and irrelevant to the development promises of the new era. One of the few options available to former political activists with little education was to join the Palestinian police force. From the onset, it was becoming clear that the police force would serve as a security contractor of Israeli occupation and would require officers to act against fellow Palestinians. For activists affiliated with a political faction that opposed the Oslo Accords, this option was not very enticing. I left that afternoon with a deeper awareness of the dubious nature of the economic and political developments of the post-Oslo era. The events of that day would consume my thoughts for months to come.

      The convening of the first elections of the PA in January 1996 was a euphoric moment for many who were concerned with the prospects for peace and stability in the region. Even those who were skeptical about the Oslo Accords and the durability of the interim agreements that paved the way for elections were cautiously supportive. But optimism slowly gave way to dismay as many began to realize that the lives of the majority of Palestinians would remain unaltered, totally untouched by the promises of the “conflict-to-peace” transition. The peace process, and the peacebuilding initiatives associated with it, remained a mere out of reach illusion for many Palestinians.4

      In order to buttress support for the peace accords, the international community provided the PA, as well as Palestinian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), with attractive aid packages, making the Palestinian territories one of the world’s highest per capita recipients of Western donor assistance. Much of the assistance to the PA was earmarked for budget support and institutional development. A substantial portion of assistance was also allocated to democracy promotion efforts, which included funding to electoral commissions, labor rights, human rights, civic education, and women’s NGOs. The initial focus of much of this support was the central regions of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—regions that would become the seat of power of the PA, which is dominated by Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini (Palestinian National Liberation Movement, or Fatah). The impact of this assistance was uneven, and only a fraction of Palestinian society had access to, or was even aware of, the developments taking place elsewhere. A related development was the demobilization of Palestinian grassroots organizations. Having come of political age during the first Intifada, I was intimately familiar with the extent to which mass-based political organizing flourished within and defined Palestinian society. This legacy of grassroots organizing, however, appeared a distant memory; most grassroots organizations, including the women’s mass-based movements, had demobilized and become mere shadows of the institutions they once were. In 2006, Hamas won the legislative elections and slowly a worst-case scenario began to unfold as political polarization, with the help of Western donor assistance, virtually paralyzed Palestinian political life.

      I began to notice a significant contrast between the Palestinian case and other cases of conflict-to-peace transition. As someone who previously worked with Salvadoran Humanitarian Aid, Research and Education Foundation fundraising to support election monitoring for their first postwar election, I noticed how in El Salvador, active mass-based organizations, including women’s groups, had managed to maintain more similar levels of political activity in the postaccord period. Moreover, they seemed to have more equal access to resources and opportunities to adapt to the new political situation. In contrast to the Palestinian case, among the many mass-based organizations that became formal, professionalized NGOs in El Salvador there was a concerted effort to include and maintain relations with former grassroots constituencies. Hence, the nature of emergent civil society organizations (CSOs) in El Salvador differed markedly from those in the Palestinian territories in terms of their respective ability to incorporate and forge horizontal linkages with other sectors of society, especially the grassroots, and by extension portended more promising prospects for democratization. Two principal sets of questions emerged from these observations: Why did a case like the Palestinian territories (which received relatively higher amounts of Western donor assistance, including substantial allocations to democracy promotion)5 lead to a more incoherent process, in which organizations had unequal access to resources, grassroots, and institutions to engage the state? Conversely, why did other cases such as El Salvador (which had actually received substantially less donor assistance, and democracy and civil society assistance in particular) seem to result in a more coherent democratic development process. Second, and more generally, what does this comparison tell us about democracy promotion efforts and the longer-term prospects for democratic development in different contexts, and why are democracy promotion efforts more successful in some contexts as opposed to others?

      These questions have assumed even greater importance given the dramatic increase in Western donor assistance for democracy promotion in recent years. Since 1991, bilateral and multilateral Western donor assistance for democracy promotion, particularly civil society development, has also become a central pillar of US foreign policy. The Middle East Partnership Initiative,6 the Broader Middle East and North Africa Partnership Initiatives,7 and the Millennium Challenge Account are only a few such recent initiatives.8 In the late 1980s, less than US$1 billion a year went to democracy assistance; by 2015, the estimated total was more than US$10 billion from all donors.9 Many new democracies have also committed themselves to spreading democracy abroad.10 In recent years, democracy promoters have even called for more heightened political intervention to shape desired “democratic” outcomes.11

      These initial reflections would guide my PhD research and later the development of this book project. What follows draws from over a decade of research, close to 150 interviews,12 and five research trips. My biggest challenge throughout this project has been to assess these political changes (to the extent possible) from the perspective of understudied groups and individuals who lived through this era. It was their stories and experiences that initially motivated this research project. Some of the activists were national leaders. Others were local community activists. Some continued their activism after the start of the peace accords, and others withdrew from political life. Among those who continued their political engagement, some continued through more formal structures such as in professionalized NGOs or government institutions, and others through informal structures and activities such as car theft. Regardless of the nature of their political participation (or lack