Hintjens, Helen

Rudin, Mercedes Alvarez

English

This study addresses political participation rights from the perspective of asocial movement. We focus on the case of the NO movement which emergedin Costa Rica in 2007 in the run-up to the Referendum on ratification of theCentral American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The study explores someways the NO movement sought to make political participation rights real forvoters during the Referendum campaign. The central focus is on how politicalparticipation rights were claimed and exercised by members of themovement. We consider how more democratic understandings of politicalparticipation emerged, during the campaign process itself from the NOmovement’s practices. The main findings are that the NO movement’sunderstanding of political participation rights was intimately connected to howthe movement framed its own collective actions, which were understood as adefence of a historically and socially-embedded Costa Rican model ofdevelopment. This in turn arose from a certain, shared nationalist vision thatcombined liberal democracy, economic nationalism and welfaristredistribution. During the CAFTA Referendum process, the NO movement’smembers sought to realize participation rights through both formal andinformal claims and practices. On the one hand, NO movement participantsdemanded – and claimed – formal institutional accountability for theprotection of these rights. At the same time, they relied heavily on their ownefforts to open up and protect new spaces for collective action. The NOmovement thus defended its own members’ and supporters’ rights to politicalparticipation in several ways. In our view, this process helped promote widercritical awareness of the prospects for active citizen involvement in publicdecision making processes in Costa Rica generally. The study suggests thateven in the absence of effective legal regulations that can be used to protectpeople’s political rights to participate, a movement can sometimes buildeffective rights realization ‘from below’, through creating spaces fordemocratic participation of citizens. It is argued that this is often a crucialdimension of rights realization and that rights to political participation can beexercised by citizens as well as claimed from the state. One of the maindemocratic contributions of the NO movement was to help open up newdebates what kind of state, what kind of society, and what kind of economicdevelopment Costa Ricans wanted. Contestations of existing power relationswere central to the pre-Referendum debates around CAFTA. And this studysuggests that the NO movement thus challenged neoliberal notions ofdevelopment and democracy both through its messages and through itsorganizational practices during the Referendum campaign. Authoritarianexclusionary and vertical logics, as well as the principles of competence andcommercialization, came into question in the process

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The 2007 'NO-CAFTA' Movement in Costa Rica:Reflecting on Social Movements and Political Participation Rights

https://pure.eur.nl/files/59734435/wp479.pdf

The 2007 'NO-CAFTA' Movement in Costa Rica:Reflecting on Social Movements and Political Participation Rights

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