Friday, May 5, 2017
Re: Social Movements and Democratization
Lisa Anderson talks about two types of states. Strong states, which can accommodate and respond to popular demands, and weak states, which attempt to ignore and suppress such demands. She characterizes strong states as ones that are stable enough to have democratic qualities, and weak ones as the opposite. She also notes that weak states have ambiguous territorial borders. A social movement would be more likely to work in Anderson's definition of a strong state because the state is not as oppressive and likely guarantees freedom of speech. However, in a weak states, a social movement would not be likely to succeed because it would be forcefully repressed by the military. Additionally, according to Anderson, the existence patronage in these types of states would prevent movements from making any significant gains because of the large gap between the elite class and the poor class that patronage enables.
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It's interesting how my interpretation of "weak" and "strong" states was different from Anderson's. It seems strength can be interpreted a couple ways: either by the power of the regime and its military, or by the amount of support it can rally from the people. Essentially, social movements test the strength of states because a least in the case of MENA, they seek to undermine the regime by uniting the people.
ReplyDeleteI think looking at Egypt, you can definitely apply Anderson's last point concerning patronage. I think in Egypt at least, social movements would have a hard time gaining traction because of the gap between the elite and the rest of the population.
ReplyDeleteGreat analysis. I personally believe the opposite--that a strong state is one that has the capability to repress a movement while a weak state is one that isn't strong enough to repress--but I guess it depends on one's own definition of a strong and weak state and what one believes the differences are between them.
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