Jonas Wolff

Peace Research Institute Frankfurt · Intrastate Conflict

Special Issue of the journal Democratization (26: 5), coordinated by the German research network External Democracy Promotion (EDP), co-edited by Annika E. Poppe, Julia Leininger and Jonas Wolff. All articles available with open access at: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fdem20/26/5.

This edited volume presents a detailed account of the dynamics of socioeconomic contention in Egypt and Tunisia since 2011. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, it analyses what has happened to the socioeconomic grievances that played a key role in the mass mobilizations of 2010 and 2011. The book is based on an original data set of soci...

In recent years, democracy has been facing increasing challenges. How has comparative regime research responded? Focusing on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, this paper argues that the perception of serious threats to democracy in general and liberal norms in particular has given rise to a convergence around the liberal conception of dem...

The threat of continued violence is a primary concern in post-conflict societies. This article contributes to the literature on post-conflict violence by analyzing a specific phenomenon that has characterized Colombia since the signing of the 2016 peace agreement: the assassination of social leaders. Building on explanations that emphasize state we...

This coauthored monograph examines how business groups have interacted with state authorities in the three central Andean countries from the mid-twentieth century through the early twenty-first. This time span covers three distinct economic regimes: the period of state-led import substitutive industrialization from the 1950s through the 1970s, the...

The last ten years have seen an emerging debate about targeted violence against social activists, with a focus on the killings of human rights defenders, environmental activists, and representatives of civil society organizations broadly speaking. Whereas violence against civilians in (civil) war contexts is an established field of study, research...

Social movement studies clearly suggest that trust matters for processes of social mobilization: When engaging in costly, and potentially risky, contentious collective action on a common goal, activists and groups rely on the expectation that fellow protestors and allies will not fail them. To date, however, we lack research that explains which typ...

En este libro, John Crabtree, Francisco Durand y Jonas Wolff investigan el rol político de las élites económicas en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú desde una perspectiva histórico-comparativa.

Mucho se ha escrito en los últimos años sobre el impacto del neoliberalismo en América Latina en las décadas de 1980 y 1990, de la reversión en algunos países a un modelo de desarrollo más estatista en las dos décadas posteriores y la dificultad de cambiar significativamente las estructuras socioeconómicas que se han caracterizado por múltiples des...

The year 2023 in Ecuador was characterized by a political crisis that erupted in the midst of escalating criminal violence. While the political crisis was eventually solved by means of new elections, the security crisis has persisted and even worsened during the first months of the presidency of Daniel Noboa. In response, in January 2024, the newly...

As part of recent years’ efforts at reaching a more context- and diversity-sensitive study of international relations, the nexus between fields of IR and Area Studies (AS) has received a renewed attention. While AS is usually presented as the “contextualizer” of the disciplines, this forum reverses the perspective by suggesting that an awareness of...

En las últimas décadas, la región andina ha experimentado avances importantes en la construcción de sistemas de pluralismo jurídico. Esta “obra en curso”, sin embargo, ha sido y sigue siendo objeto de duras disputas sociales, jurídicas y políticas. El artículo explora una perspectiva teórica que destaca la relación entre el conflicto y la (des)conf...

Since the redemocratization of much of Latin America in the 1980s and a regional wave of anti-austerity protests in the 1990s, social movement studies has become an important part of sociological, political, and anthropological scholarship on the region. The subdiscipline has framed debates about formal and informal politics, spatial and relational...

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the globe implemented severe restrictions of civic freedoms to contain the spread of the virus. The global health emergency posed the risk of governments seizing the pandemic as a window of opportunity to curb (potential) challenges to their power, thereby reinforcing the ongoing, w...

In this article, we address the question of how policy orientation shapes academic research from a sociological perspective. Policy orientation involves the mobilization of scientific resources and the “mobilization of the world.” Our analysis is based on Bourdieusian field theory and focuses on democracy promotion research (DPR). It shows that DPR...

The academic essay discusses the relationship between human rights and peace in the context of the controversy over the phenomenon of shrinking civic spaces, that is, the global trend of increasing restrictions on the capacity, autonomy and collective action of civil society actors. Analyzing the recent wave of civic space restrictions from a polit...

Ein zentrales Element des kolumbianischen Friedensprozesses mit der FARC-Guerilla bildet die kollektive Wiedereingliederung der ehemaligen Kombattant:innen in eigens dafür eingerichteten „territorialen Reinkorporationsräumen“. Eine Umfrage in sieben ländlichen Gemeinden deutet darauf hin, dass dieser Reinkorporationsprozess zu einem erkennbaren Abb...

A central element of the Colombian peace process with the FARC-EP guerrillas is the collective re­integration of former combatants in specially designated “Territorial Spaces for Training and Re­incorporation.” A survey conducted in seven rural municipalities suggests that this re­integration process has led to a significant re­duction in the perce...

Reconstruir el tejido social es uno de los desafíos más grandes en los procesos de construcción de paz, especialmente cuando se trata de superar conflictos armados internos prolongados. Este policy brief presenta los principales resultados de un proyecto de investigación que, con base en más de 1200 encuestas realizadas en siete municipios con AETC...

Violence in post-conflict settings is often attributed to a post-war boom in organized crime, facilitated by the demobilization of armed groups and the persisting weakness of the state. The article argues that this is only one pathway of post-conflict violence. A second causal pathway emerges from the challenges that peace processes can constitute...

Since the turn of the century, an increasing number of governments around the world has introduced or tightened restrictions on civil society organizations (CSOs). Attempts by local CSOs and external actors to counter this trend of shrinking civic spaces have been mostly unsuccessful. In a few notable cases, however, civic space restrictions have b...

The chapter analyzes the characteristics, historical evolution, contemporary usages and political implications of the concept of self-determination in international relations. It identifies the concept’s descriptive core and further characteristics. Then, the chapter looks at competing conceptions of self-determination, both in historical perspecti...

Existe un vínculo entre la violencia contra líderes sociales y la participación electoral. Ambas variables se relacionan de forma inversa, es decir, a mayor número de asesinatos menor participación. à Por el contrario, el nivel de participación en una elección previa es un buen predictor de lo que sucederá en la posterior. Así, a menor participació...

This PRIF Working Paper reviews and discusses the scholarship on the political economy of macroeconomic stabilization and neoliberal structural adjustment, focusing on Latin American experiences during the 1980s and early 1990s. It discusses controversies, arguments and findings on a couple of key issues: the role of regime type (democratic versus...

Ever since the conclusion of the peace deal between the Colombian government and FARC guerrilla in late 2016, the number of social leaders murdered has risen sharply-something that even the latest developments surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic have had little bearing on. These acts of violence are frequently attributed to the presence of armed non-...

Seit dem Abschluss des Friedensabkommens zwischen der kolumbianischen Regierung und der FARC-Guerrilla Ende 2016 sind die Morde an sozialen Aktivist*innen deutlich angestiegen. Daran hat sich auch unter den Bedingungen der COVID-19-Pandemie nichts geändert. Häufig wird diese Gewalt allein auf die Präsenz bewaffneter, nichtstaatlicher Akteure und de...

La violencia ejercida contra líderes y lideresas sociales después del Acuer-do de paz no solo es el resultado de la presencia de grupos criminales y economías ilegales: sigue también una lógica política: actores políticos locales delegan en grupos armados ilegales el uso de la violencia contra rivales políticos y líderes sociales que amenazan con d...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of countries worldwide have introduced severe limitations on the freedom of assembly, if not an outright lockdown, in many cases complemented by restrictions on further civil and political rights. Although restrictions were generally considered necessary to save lives and protect health care systems...

Wenn die bolivianische Bevölkerung am 18. Oktober an die Urnen tritt, um ein neues Staatsoberhaupt und das Parlament zu wählen, geht es um nichts weniger als das Erbe der Regierung von Ex-Präsident Evo Morales, der das Land zwischen 2006 und 2019 geführt hat. Gelingt dessen Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) ein knappes Jahr nach Morales‘ überraschende...

In Bolivia, the year 2019 marks the end of an era: In November, after almost 14 years in power, Evo Morales was forced to prematurely leave the presidency and, shortly thereafter, also the country. This dramatic event was preceded by contentious elections, allegations of electoral fraud, massive post-electoral protests, and the switching of sides b...

Democracy is one of those essentially contested concepts that, in W. B. Gallie’s famous dictum, “inevitably involve endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users” (1956, 169). Combining the Greek words for “people” (demos) and “to rule” (kratein), democracy literally means to rule by the people. Here the conceptual disputes st...

Development cooperation is increasingly being conducted in conflict-affected states. As violent conflicts grow and spread, so does the expectation that development cooperation will constructively contribute to their resolution. At the same time, current conflict dynamics put decades of development progress at risk. The development-peace nexus is no...

This chapter presents the rationale and the topic of the book, the questions that are addressed, and the state of research on which it is based. It critically reflects upon the contentious politics approach as applied in the book, and elaborates the analytical framework that is used to systematically study socioeconomic contention in Egypt and Tuni...

Taking the different case studies of the book together, one general observation stands out: Key agents of socioeconomic contention, including movements by organized labor and the unemployed that were important in the run-up to the uprisings and that saw their political opportunities open up in the immediate aftermath of the revolutions, have since...

This chapter shows that organized labor across Latin America played a significant role in the destabilization of authoritarian regimes and the (re-)turn to democracy during “the long 1980s.” At the same time, political democratization—and the turn from a state-centered to a market-oriented (“neoliberal”) development model that accompanied it—dramat...

This chapter identifies key features that have characterized (socioeconomic) contention by marginalized groups in Latin American since the late 1970s. First, in some countries, the contentious collective action by grassroots organizations representing marginalized sectors as well as their participation in broader, multi-class protests contributed t...

En este trabajo trato de analizar el reposicionamiento político de las élites económicas bolivianas en la última fase del gobierno del Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), durante la crisis y caída de este gobierno en octubre y noviembre del 2019 y en el contexto actual. El enfoque se centrará en las representaciones institucionales más importantes del...

With the ebbing of the pink tide, the MAS government in Bolivia remains as one of the most successful leftist governments that had been elected throughout Latin America since the late 1990s. In order to better understand this surprising success story, this paper analyses the political economy of the post-neoliberal model that has taken shape under...

The paper analyses why Egypt’s labour movement, while having played a significant role in the run-up to the 2011 revolution, has been increasingly marginalised politically ever since, failing to achieve either significant labour-specific gains and/or broader objectives related to the overall process of political transformation. It does so by invest...

Colombia’s peace process with the FARC-EP has brought a significant reduction in the national levels of violence. Yet, in certain regions of the country the demobilisation of Colombia’s former largest guerrilla has been accompanied by rising rates of violence. The municipality of Tumaco in the extreme south of the country’s Pacific coast is a case...

The introductory chapter outlines the rationale of the volume and the shared conceptual approach of the chapters. It situates the specific focus of the book on empirically observable justice conflicts and their consequences within the broader literature on justice, peace, and global governance, provides shared definitions of key terms, and sketches...

This chapter applies the conception of democracy promotion as an interactive process that is crucially affected by conflicts over conceptions of justice to the relations between the US and Bolivia. Since 2009, the USA and the Bolivian government have been trying to fix their broken diplomatic relations. These negotiations culminated in 2011 in the...

In the global ‘North-West’, liberal democracy is regarded as the universally valid model of political rule that is to be promoted globally via foreign and development policies. Democracy promotion, however, is frequently challenged by justice-related claims. Whereas external democracy promoters claim to help enforce universal individual rights, tho...

This article makes the case for why we should turn to studying democracy promotion negotiation, outlines the research questions guiding this special issue, identifies overarching findings and summarizes the individual contributions. After outlining the rationale for more attention to the issue of negotiation, which we understand as a specific form...

This book studies the justice concerns of political actors in important international regimes and international and domestic conflicts and traces their effects on peace and conflict. The book demonstrates that such justice concerns play an ambivalent role for the resolution of conflicts and maintenance of order. While arrangements that actors perce...

In seiner Kritik des neuen Forschungsprogramms der HSFK formuliert Andreas Nölke zwei zentrale Bedenken: Erstens sei das Programm „Frieden und Zwang“ normativ dem Zwang zugeneigt, zweitens theoretisch und empirisch ahistorisch. In unserer Replik greifen wir diese Kritikpunkte auf. Statt einer tendenziellen Befürwortung des Zwangs befasst sich das F...

Since 2005, international civil society support has faced increasing resistance around the world. Ethiopia is widely recognized as a key example of this so-called Closing Space phenomenon. With the 2009 Charities and Societies Proclamation (CSP) Ethiopia has established strict regulations on civil society organizations that, in particular, restrict...

This article presents an analytical framework that guides the contributions to this special issue and, in general terms, aims at enabling a systematic investigation of processes of negotiation in the international promotion of democracy. It first briefly introduces the rationale for studying democracy promotion negotiation, offers a definition, and...

Argentina - The Right to the City: Popular Contention in Contemporary Buenos Aires. By Gabriela Ippolito-O'Donnell. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2011. Pp. 320. $38.00 paper. - Volume 75 Issue 4 - Jonas Wolff

Mit dem Ende 2016 besiegelten Friedensabkommen mit der FARC-Guerilla bietet sich Kolumbien die histori-sche Chance, nicht nur einen über 50 Jahre währenden bewaffneten Konflikt hinter sich zu lassen, sondern auch langfristige gesellschaftliche Veränderungen anzustoßen. Anfang August hat nun allerdings mit Iván Duque ein Politiker die Präsidentschaf...

The peace agreement that Colombia sealed with the FARC-EP guerrillas in late 2016 offers the country the historic opportunity to leave behind an armed conflict that has lasted for over 50 years and to initiate long-term social changes. In early August, however, Iván Duque, a conservative politician who represents critics of the agreement and who wa...

Con el acuerdo de paz con la guerrilla de las FARC-EP a finales de 2016, Colombia tiene la oportunidad históri-ca no sólo de dejar atrás un conflicto armado que ha durado más de 50 años, sino también de poner en marcha cambios sociales a largo plazo. Sin embargo, a principios de agosto, Iván Duque, un político que representa a los críticos conserva...

Lawrence C. Heilman, USAID in Bolivia: Partner or Patrón? Boulder: FirstForum Press, 2017. Appendixes, chronology, tables, bibliography, index, 346 pp.; hardcover $85, ebook $85. - Volume 60 Issue 3 - Jonas Wolff

The year 2017 in Ecuador has been marked, first, by the electoral victory of Alianza PAIS and, then, by the rapidly escalating conflict within the governing party. With the departure from office of Rafael Correa, who had governed the country since 2007, Ecuadorian politics has entered a new period which is characterized by political realignments an...

Für Kolumbiens Noch-Präsident Juan Manuel Santos ist es eine bittere Niederlage: Rund anderthalb Jahre nach Abschluss des historischen Friedensvertrags zwischen der kolumbianischen Regierung und der FARC-Guerilla zieht nun mit Iván Duque ein erklärter Gegner des Abkommens in die Casa de Nariño, den Präsidentenpalast in der kolumbianischen Hauptstad...

The phenomenon of closing civic space essentially reflects a political struggle over the legitimate role of civil society organizations in public affairs as well as over the legitimate role of the state in regulating such civil society activities. The public sphere is a key site in which this struggle is waged. In general, in the context of closing...

Since President Morales took office in Bolivia in early 2006, the country has undergone a complex political transformation. This profound process of change is, however, hardly reflected in established democracy indices, which by and large paint a picture of institutional continuity. Taking this puzzling observation as a starting point, the article...

El Instituto Colombo-Alemán para la Paz – CAPAZ publica su primer documento de trabajo “Dinámicas territoriales de la violencia y del conflicto armado antes y después del acuerdo de paz con las FARC-EP. Estudio de caso: municipio de Tumaco, Nariño”. Los autores son los investigadores Luis Gabriel Salas Salazar y Fabián Eduardo Camelo (Universidad...

Is democracy in crisis throughout the world and how alarmed should we be? And what about international democracy promotion - is there a need for reconceptualization? This PRIF Report is a joint policy paper written by members of the research network "External Democracy Promotion" (EDP Network). It aims at giving a concise and pointed overview of ke...

Eine Nichtregierungsorganisation, die regelmäßig durch regierungskritische Statements und Aktionen auf sich aufmerksam macht, erhält ein Schreiben des für sie zuständigen Finanzamtes: Da sie sich über Gebühr politisch engagiere, werde ihr der Status als gemeinnützige Organisation entzogen. Die Entscheidung ist existenzbedrohend, stehen mit dem Verl...

Civil society organizations are facing increasing political restrictions all over the world. Frequently, these restrictions apply to the foreign funding of NGOs and thus curtail the space for external civil society support, which, since the 1990s, has become a key element in international democracy and human rights promotion. This so-called ‘closin...

Since 2009 the USA and the Bolivian government have been trying to fix their broken diplomatic relations. These negotiations culminated in 2011 in the signing of a bilateral agreement but, ultimately, failed to establish a basis for mutually acceptable development aid relations. This article analyses these negotiations and suggests a partial explan...

The concluding chapter discusses three overarching questions that are crucial for the academic study of the interactive practices through which extractivism is contested. First, taking the notion of contested extractivism seriously, the chapter discusses the types of contestation of extractivism that are highlighted in the literature and suggests a...

The existing research on international democracy promotion is characterised by a peculiar tension. On the one hand, many scholars agree that, since 1990, democracy promotion has indeed become a significant aim guiding the foreign and development policies of North-Western democracies. On the other hand, there is a far-reaching consensus that this no...

The Argentine unemployed movement of the piqueteros was a key socio-political player in the early 2000s. Although public and academic attention paid to these piqueteros has decreased notably since 2010, they continue to be active. This article provides an empirical update to the existing research on Argentina’s unemployed movement by analysing how...

The article analyzes and compares the dynamics of business-government relations in Bolivia and Ecuador during the presidencies of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa. It specifically traces the shift from confrontation to rapprochement to a fairly stable pattern of negotiation and dialogue that characterizes the two governments' interaction with core bus...

In studying the global spread and implementation of liberal norms, scholars have moved from linear notions of norm diffusion and promotion to an emphasis on norm contestation. Contestation by the supposed beneficiaries and addressees has taken centre stage in both research on the norms that underpin global governance and in studies on democracy pro...

International peacebuilding is usually discussed as liberal peacebuilding. Indeed, the implementation of liberal-democratic norms and institutions constitutes a core element of mainstream peacebuilding as practiced since 1990. Yet international activities aiming at democracy promotion go beyond the specific field of peacebuilding. Since 1990, they...

The international promotion of democracy is about power, but the scholarship on this issue offers little systematic attention to the role and relevance that power might have in this context. This article critically discusses the literature that does explicitly deal with power in democracy promotion and proposes a multidimensional perspective as a w...

Critics of liberal peacebuilding have started to move beyond mere criticism and think about what hybrid or post-liberal peacebuilding might mean. This article aims at contributing to this debate by bringing contemporary experiences in that are usually not reflected in the peacebuilding literature. Since the turn of the century, political changes in...

This working paper outlines a research agenda that aims at studying the dynamics and consequences of socioeconomic contention during the current processes of political transformation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region from a comparative perspective that includes an interregional comparison with South America. In doing so, the authors...

This essay places the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in the context of the academic and political rise of liberal interventionism since 1990. It argues that this historical event is important for the debate about 'humanitarian interventions' in two different ways: on the one hand, as a signifier, 'Rwanda 1994' has been used (or, for that matter, misused)...

The paper discusses the norm of self-determination as a core element of and a difficult challenge to international democracy promotion. Collective self-determination is part and parcel of the promise of democracy and, hence, of democracy promotion. Yet, at the same time, the idea that political communities should determine themselves clashes with d...

The 1990s rise of democracy promotion as an aim and a strategy of the foreign and development policies of the established democracies in the global North-West was premised on the assumption that in supporting the global spread of democratic regimes, finally, ‘values and interests reinforce each other’, as Strobe Talbott put it in 1996. The ‘third w...

Though scholarly attention to democracy promotion is increasing, there is still little comparative and theoretically-based work on the protagonists of democracy promotion. This book investigates the motives that drive democracy promotion in a comparative and theoretically oriented manner, exploring how democracy promoters deal with conflicting obje...

While Germany is generally considered one of the most important democracy promoters, there is still limited work on the German approach to promoting democracy. There is a general understanding that Germany – as a civilian power – should be guided by democratic values in its external affairs, but it is neither theoretically nor empirically very clea...

In the global ‘North-West’, liberal democracy is regarded as the universally valid model of political rule that is to be promoted globally via foreign and development policies. Democracy promotion, however, is frequently challenged by justice-related claims. Whereas external democracy promoters claim to help enforce universal individual rights, tho...

Recent political changes across Latin America that challenge mainstream conceptions of liberal democracy have led to speculation about some kind of post-liberal democracy possibly emerging in the region. Up to now, however, there has been no systematic assessment of this proposition or any explicit conception of post-liberal democracy. This article...

Promoting democracy implies fostering political empowerment and self-determination. Although this creates obvious problems for any external policy seeking to change authoritarian regimes, mainstream thinking on democratization in the case of post-transition countries would predict a somewhat easier task for potential democracy promoters: cooperatio...

Demokratieförderung soll, so der Anspruch, sowohl den Interessen als auch den Normen westlicher Demokratien entsprechen. In der Praxis ist sie allerdings regelmäßig mit Zielkonflikten konfrontiert. In theoriegeleiteter, komparativer Perspektive fragt der Band, wie Demokratieförderer mit Zielkonflikten umgehen, und analysiert die Bestimmungsfaktoren...