Grassroots Politics and Oil Culture in Venezuela
Grassroots Politics and Oil Culture in Venezuela

Author: Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 3319595075

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This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book presents an ethnographic study of how grassroots activism in Venezuela during the Chávez presidency can be understood in relation to the country's history as a petro-state. Taking the contested relationship between the popular sectors and the Venezuelan state as a point of departure, Iselin Åsedotter Strønen explores how notions such as class, race, state, bureaucracy, popular politics, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumption, oil wealth, and corruption gained salience in the Bolivarian process. A central argument is that the Bolivarian process was an attempt to challenge the practices, ideas, and values inherited from Venezuela's historical development as an oil-producing state. Drawing on rich ethnographic material from Caracas' shantytowns, state institutions, as well as everyday life and public culture, Strønen explores the complexities and challenges in fostering deep social and political change.

Grassroots Politics and Oil Culture in Venezuela
Grassroots Politics and Oil Culture in Venezuela

Author: Iselin Åsedotter Strønen

Publisher: Saint Philip Street Press

Published: 2020-10-09

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9781013289200

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This book presents an ethnographic study of how grassroots activism in Venezuela during the Chávez presidency can be understood in relation to the country's history as a petro-state. Taking the contested relationship between the popular sectors and the Venezuelan state as a point of departure, Iselin Åsedotter Strønen explores how notions such as class, race, state, bureaucracy, popular politics, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumption, oil wealth, and corruption gained salience in the Bolivarian process. A central argument is that the Bolivarian process was an attempt to challenge the practices, ideas, and values inherited from Venezuela's historical development as an oil-producing state. Drawing on rich ethnographic material from Caracas' shantytowns, state institutions, as well as everyday life and public culture, Strønen explores the complexities and challenges in fostering deep social and political change. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture
Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture

Author: Kerry M. Kartchner

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-11

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 1000956350

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This handbook offers a collection of cutting-edge essays on all aspects of strategic culture by a mix of international scholars, consultants, military officers, and policymakers. The volume explicitly addresses the analytical conundrums faced by scholars who wish to employ or generate strategic cultural insights, with substantive commentary on defining and scoping strategic culture, analytic frameworks and approaches, levels of analysis, sources of strategic culture, and modalities of change in strategic culture. The chapters engage strategic culture at the civilizational, regional, supra-national, national, non-state actor, and organizational levels. The volume is divided into five thematic parts, which will appeal to both students who are new to the subject and scholars who wish to incorporate strategic culture into their toolbox of analytical techniques. Part I assesses the evolving theoretical strengths and weaknesses of the field. Part II lays out elements of the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field, including sources and components of strategic culture. Part III presents a number of national strategic cultural profiles, representing the state of contemporary strategic culture scholarship. Part IV addresses the utility of strategic culture for practitioners and scholars. Part V summarizes the key theoretical and practical insights offered by the volume’s contributors. This handbook will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, defense studies, security studies, and international relations in general, as well as to professional practitioners.

The Confrontational ‘Us and Them’ Dynamics of Polarised Politics in Venezuela
The Confrontational ‘Us and Them’ Dynamics of Polarised Politics in Venezuela

Author: Ybiskay González Torres

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-11-11

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1538144492

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This book provides a theoretical framework for understanding polarised politics. Contrary to the common understanding that polarisation is associated with populism and illiberal democracies, this book demonstrates that polarisation is by no means the result of one anti-democratic side of the conflict. By proposing this analytical inquiry, this book advances a new theoretical framework to characterise politics as either polarised or not. This framework is a unique approach that integrates people’s agency and socio-historical constraints to explain polarisation in depth. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discourse, subject, and governmentality, and Laclau’s concept of logics and hegemony, this framework focuses on how to distinguish polarised politics from another form of politics. As a technology of power, polarisation can be performed by a variety of actors and is governed by a broad, conscious end, that is organising society by reducing the possibilities of alternative ways of thinking, speaking and doing politics to two options. This study takes a deep dive into the political polarisation in Venezuela, a country with almost two decades of conflict between Chavismo and the Opposition disputing the meaning of democracy, and with the most critical crisis in the Americas as a result of polarisation. With close attention paid to the logics or rationalities of power to explain what lies behind definitions of democracy. This analysis allows us to observe the rationalities and dynamics beyond what is said, in particular, the book explores hegemonic logics (myths, fantasies of threats and promises) used by both political groups to create a political identity.

We Created Chávez
We Created Chávez

Author: Geo Maher

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0822354527

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Since being elected president in 1998, Hugo Chávez has become the face of contemporary Venezuela and, more broadly, anticapitalist revolution. George Ciccariello-Maher contends that this focus on Chávez has obscured the inner dynamics and historical development of the country’s Bolivarian Revolution. In We Created Chávez, by examining social movements and revolutionary groups active before and during the Chávez era, Ciccariello-Maher provides a broader, more nuanced account of Chávez’s rise to power and the years of activism that preceded it. Based on interviews with grassroots organizers, former guerrillas, members of neighborhood militias, and government officials, Ciccariello-Maher presents a new history of Venezuelan political activism, one told from below. Led by leftist guerrillas, women, Afro-Venezuelans, indigenous people, and students, the social movements he discusses have been struggling against corruption and repression since 1958. Ciccariello-Maher pays particular attention to the dynamic interplay between the Chávez government, revolutionary social movements, and the Venezuelan people, recasting the Bolivarian Revolution as a long-term and multifaceted process of political transformation.

The Social Life of Economic Inequalities in Contemporary Latin America
The Social Life of Economic Inequalities in Contemporary Latin America

Author: Margit Ystanes

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-25

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 331961536X

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This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited volume examines how economic processes have worked upon social lives and social realities in Latin America during the past decades. Through tracing the effects of the neoliberal epoch into the era of the so-called pink tide, the book seeks to understand to what extent the turn to the left at the start of the millennium managed to challenge historically constituted configurations of inequality. A central argument in the book is that in spite of economic reforms and social advances on a range of arenas, the fundamental tenants of socio-economic inequalities have not been challenged substantially. As several countries are now experiencing a return to right-wing politics, this collection helps us better understand why inequalities are so entrenched in the Latin American continent, but also the complex and creative ways that it is continuously contested. The book directs itself to students, scholars and anyone interested in Latin America, economic anthropology, political anthropology, left-wing politics, poverty and socio-economic inequalities.

Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy
Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy

Author: David Smilde

Publisher: Duke University Press Books

Published: 2011-08-05

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780822350248

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Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy brings together a variety of perspectives on participation and democracy in Venezuela. An interdisciplinary group of contributors focuses on the everyday lives of Venezuelans, examining the forms of participation that have emerged in communal councils, cultural activities, blogs, community media, and several other forums. The essays validate many of the critiques of democracy under Chávez, as well as much of the praise. They show that while government corporatism and clientelism are constant threats, the forms of political and cultural participation discussed are creating new discourses, networks, and organizational spaces—for better and for worse. With open yet critical minds, the contributors seek to analyze Venezuela’s Bolivarian democratic experience through empirical research. In doing so, they reveal a nuanced process, a richer and more complex one than is conveyed in international journalism and scholarship exclusively focused on the words and actions of Hugo Chávez. Contributors Carolina Acosta-Alzuru Julia Buxton Luis Duno Gottberg Sujatha Fernandes María Pilar García-Guadilla Kirk A. Hawkins Daniel Hellinger Michael E. Johnson Luis E. Lander Margarita López-Maya Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols Coraly Pagan Guillermo Rosas Naomi Schiller David Smilde Alejandro Velasco

Society and Economy in Venezuela
Society and Economy in Venezuela

Author: Vitor Eduardo Schincariol

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-28

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 3030600831

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This book presents an overview of the economic policies adopted by the Bolivarian governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela between 1998 and 2018, and the economic and social results of these policies. The recent history of Venezuela has attracted much attention due to Chávez’s and Maduro’s self-declared search for socialism since the beginning of the 21st century and the economic trajectory of the country in this period, which experienced significant economic growth during the international oil boom in the first decade of the century, followed by a huge economic crisis in the second decade. The volume adopts an economic history approach, taking into account both economic and social variables to analyze the Venezuelan overall socio-economic performance since 1998. Drawing on official documents and statistics, as well as on the available literature, it presents an empirical analysis of Venezuelan economic and social histories during the Bolivarian period, describing and analyzing the achievements and limits of the policies adopted between 1998 and 2018. Society and Economy in Venezuela: An Overview of the Bolivarian Period (1998-2018) will be a useful introduction to sociologists, political economists, political scientists, economic historians and other social scientists interested in understanding the multiple interrelations between economy and society in Bolivarian Venezuela. “This book offers a thoughtful, committed and illuminating analysis of the socialist experiment in Venezuela. Its strengths and weaknesses are examined in unprecedented detail, in order to identify the drivers and limitation of 'socialism in the 21st century'. An essential work for scholars, students and citizens concerned with Venezuela.” – Alfredo Saad-Filho, King's College London

Predatory Economies
Predatory Economies

Author: Amy Penfield

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2023-04-18

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1477327088

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A study of the modes of predation used by and against the Sanema people of Venezuela.

Deepening Democracy in Post-Neoliberal Bolivia and Venezuela
Deepening Democracy in Post-Neoliberal Bolivia and Venezuela

Author: John Brown

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-02-27

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1000546152

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This book provides a timely and nuanced analysis of the successes and shortcoming of efforts to move beyond market democracy in Bolivia and Venezuela. A twin crisis of democratic representation and socio-economic precarity created space for anti-system outsiders to emerge on the left flank of traditional party-systems in Bolivia and Venezuela, paving the way for a "post-neoliberal" democratization process. Over the course of the projects headed by Evo Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, however, power struggles emerged between a recalcitrant elite, the left-led government, and organized popular sectors. These tensions shaped the pathways that processes followed, with simultaneous democratization and de-democratization occurring whereby a partial deepening and extending of democratic quality for popular sectors was accompanied by the bending of liberal norms. Comparing the varying balance and forms of power between competing actors, this book offers a novel and rich explanation of the partial and stuttering efforts to advance a post-neoliberal democracy in Bolivia and Venezuela. Bringing important insights on the reasons for the emergence of anti-system leaders and parties, the impact that they have on the quality of democracy, and how progressive governments interact with social movements, this book will be of interest to researchers studying Latin America, as well as those specializing in development and political science more broadly.