Mirroring Opposition Threats

Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Movement came to power in 1999 promising to refound the Venezuelan state and restructure the polity in ways that would build “popular power” through the promotion of grassroots participation, organization, and mobilization. Once in office, the Bolivarian forces launched a series of initiatives to sponsor organization and mobilization among supporters, which ranged widely in their functions and strategic purpose. State-mobilized organizations can be seen as operating in three different arenas of politics: the local governance arena; the electoral arena; and the protest arena. From an ideological standpoint, the Bolivarian Movement was oriented toward sponsoring organizations that could operate in the first of these arenas, helping realize Chávez’s vision of constructing a “protagonistic democracy” by establishing vehicles for citizen participation in local governance. In the terminology of this volume, these activities are best seen as a form of “infrastructural mobilization,” working to solidify political support and achieve the government’s longer-term aims

End of the regime : how three European dictatorships ended

Published online: 01 January 2023The first book by a Russian author about how the last three dictatorships of Western Europe ended - the regimes of Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal and the 'black colonels' in Greece. Alexander Baunov is a well-known journalist, political researcher, editor-in-chief of the websites carnegie.ru and carnegie.politika, and a former diplomat. In 2022, he became a guest of the VDud channel. The book contains options for the transition from a dictatorship to democracy