Rachel A. Schwartz – författare

Undermining the State from Within pulls back the curtain on the counterinsurgent state to better understand how conflict dynamics affect state institutions and continue to shape political and economic development in the postwar period. Drawing on unique archival and interview data from war and postwar Central America, this book illuminates how counterinsurgent actors, under the pretext of combatting an insurgent threat, introduce alternative rules within state institutions, which undermine core activities like tax collection, public security provision, and property administration. Moreover, it uncovers how the counterinsurgent elite outmaneuvers governance reforms during democratic transition and peacebuilding to preserve the predatory wartime status quo. In so doing, this book rethinks the relationship between war and state formation, challenges existing scholarly and policy approaches to peacebuilding and post-conflict institutional reform and contributes a new understanding of what civil war leaves behind in an institutional sense.

Undermining the State from Within pulls back the curtain on the counterinsurgent state to better understand how conflict dynamics affect state institutions and continue to shape political and economic development in the postwar period. Drawing on unique archival and interview data from war and postwar Central America, this book illuminates how counterinsurgent actors, under the pretext of combatting an insurgent threat, introduce alternative rules within state institutions, which undermine core activities like tax collection, public security provision, and property administration. Moreover, it uncovers how the counterinsurgent elite outmaneuvers governance reforms during democratic transition and peacebuilding to preserve the predatory wartime status quo. In so doing, this book rethinks the relationship between war and state formation, challenges existing scholarly and policy approaches to peacebuilding and post-conflict institutional reform and contributes a new understanding of what civil war leaves behind in an institutional sense.

This Element seeks to unpack the varied modalities of democratic erosion in Latin America by proposing a novel analytical framework that breaks down backsliding episodes into their constituent parts: (1) the actors that promote autocratization and those that resist it, (2) the strategies that autocratizers and oppositions employ, (3) the arenas of contention in which they struggle over democratic norms and institutions, and (4) the objectives that these different actors pursue in the promotion of or resistance to democratic erosion. This framework is applied to five contemporary cases that reflect a new, diversified wave of democratic erosion, including El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Honduras. Through comparative analysis, we derive preliminary insights on the kinds of strategies pursued by different constellations of autocratizers and opposition actors, in hopes of stimulating future avenues of research and contributing to scholar and practitioner efforts to reverse alarming autocratic trends in the region.