The Importing Democracy Blog

I was drinking my morning coffee on Saturday, reading the Santa Fe New Mexican, and wondering how this country would get through the bomb attacks and the midterms. And then we were all confronted with the worst anti-Semitic violence on American soil in history. My first thought was “We are all Jews.” In my own case, this has a double meaning. My first husband, who died young, was Jewish and one of our sons and his wife are raising their two children as Jewish. My other son’s two children are an interesting mix of Jewish, WASP and Mexican American. But,

It was September 1961. I had just turned twenty and was high above the Pacific on a Braniff jet enjoying an eight-course meal with white wine, courtesy of a booking error. As a Pomona College junior I was excited about my forthcoming semester abroad in Chile. Yes, I knew about fall being spring in the southern hemisphere, but nothing could have prepared me for the blossoming cherry trees on the taxi ride into Santiago. Another surprise was the high tea that awaited my arrival. Chileans, I learned from my host family, have an affinity for English customs, as well as pride

As a political scientist who has focused on “democratization NGOs” (nongovernmental organizations) in South Africa, Tajikistan, and Argentina, I was intrigued by the recent emergence of similar organizations in my own country.  After the 2016 election, I started volunteering for a new political organization, founded, prophetically, even before Trump was elected, in April of 2016 (brandnewcongress.org) by veterans of the Bernie Sanders campaign. It immediately attracted major volunteer and financial support, particularly from idealistic, young millennials, but also from older followers such as myself.   The founding “post- partisan” principle of BNC was to look for “extraordinary, ordinary” people in

In my last blog, I wrote that political sanity can emerge from political insanity. The wide, diverse opposition to Donald Trump, evidence of political sanity, has only become more apparent since his inauguration.  What we are seeing out there is a kind of wild political rainforest, containing a wealth of democratic organizations. While these include the big, endangered species such as the two parties, they also encompass smaller, more adaptable species, especially within the nonprofit sector, that focus on rescuing, preserving and strengthening democracy. Some of these democratization organizations have been around for a long time, but have been revitalized by their

In June I attended the International Society for Third Sector Research in Stockholm. Although I chaired an exciting panel on the suppression of civil society and presented awards, the most memorable moment for me was when a Swedish professor described the dramatic growth of civil society in Iraq, despite, or maybe even because of, the violence. When he first began studying Iraq, “you could count the indigenous NGOs on one hand. Now they are everywhere, doing everything- health, microenterprise promotion, women’s rights…

More than two decades ago, I published a book about indigenous development NGOs in the Third World.  At that time, my overall impression was that governments were largely unaware of the significance and dramatic growth of civil society in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This remained true even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of civil society in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. However, during the 1990s governments began to worry that civil society could threaten politics as usual. One reason for this concern was the increasing support for civil society by “official” foreign assistance.

On October 9th the Nobel Prize Committee made a remarkable decision. By choosing a quartet of civil society organizations instrumental to Tunisia’s democratic transition, they validated the connections between democratization and peace. While the Arab Spring led to violence, chaos, terrorism, and repression in much of the Middle East, the head of the Nobel Committee described the role of the Dialogue Quartet as leading “an alternative peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war.”

Shortly after the Nobel announcement, a friend asked me why I hadn’t blogged about the prize. “Its what your book is all about– civil society promoting democracy.” In this case, my procrastination turned out to be a good thing.