Bøger af Donna Lee Van Cott

Since the conquest, indigenous communities throughout Latin American have endured with astonishing restraint a multitude of impositions and indignities. Occasionally that restraint has been punctuated by cycles of rebellion and repression.

After a decade in local office, are indigenous peoples' governments in the Andes fulfilling their promise to provide a more participatory, accountable, and deliberative form of democracy? Using current debates in democratic theory as a framework, Donna Lee Van Cott examines 10 examples of institutional innovation by indigenous party-controlled municipalities in Bolivia and Ecuador. In contrast to studies emphasizing the role of individuals and civil society, the findings underscore the contributions of leadership and political parties to promoting participation and deliberation - even at the local level. Democratic quality is more likely to improve where local actors initiate and design institutions. Van Cott concludes that indigenous parties' innovations have improved democratic quality in some respects, but that authoritarian tendencies endemic to Andean cultures and political organizations have limited their positive impact.

Since the Conquest, indigenous communities throughout Latin America have endured with astonishing restraint a multitude of impositions and indignities. Occasionally that restraint has been punctuated by cycles of rebellion and repression. Violent confrontations between Indian organizations and the state in the last two years indicate a growing frustration by indigenous peoples with political attempts to advance their demands. Major altercations have occurred in Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia, with smaller scale confrontations becoming a regular occurrence as Indian communities grow increasingly defiant of state authority in the wake of repeated violations of indigenous territorial and human rights. While in some countries such groups have been able to achieve recognition and protection through constitutional and legal reforms, Indians in general continue to be disproportionately the poorest of the poor and regular victims of human rights abuses. They are chronically under represented in political office in all countries of the Americas.This paper explores the complex nexus of security issues that the governments of Latin America and the indigenous communities of the region face at the end of the 20th century. A better understanding of security issues from the perspective of indigenous communities should enable policymakers in the United States to estimate more accurately how U.S. policy plays a role in the aggravation or resolution of interethnic conflict in Latin America. Although the national contexts of indigenous-state relations differ markedly throughout the hemisphere, relevant issues of national security are strikingly similar -- maintenance of international borders, eradication and interdiction of drugs, suppression of armed insurgencies, and containment of rural unrest. National governments, state armed forces, and indigenous peoples, however, all have different conceptions of the meaning of "national security."

Based on interviews with more than 100 participants, Van Cott demonstrates how social issues were placed on the constitutional reform agenda and transformed into the nation's highest law. She follows each reform for five years to assess early results of what she calls an emerging model of multicultural constitutionalism.