Party-building after civil conflict: insurgent successor parties in Latin America

Thesis

Party-building is notoriously difficult. Recent scholarship has shown that a high proportion of the few successful parties to have emerged in Latin America in the last 50 years were formed after exceptional conditions of polarization and conflict. This thesis addresses a subset of parties formed under the most extreme form of conflict: war. Insurgent Successor Parties (ISPs) pose very specific challenges and opportunities for party-building, yet we lack a clear understanding of the factors that lead to their failure or success. This thesis builds on prior research and offers a novel explanation based on the legacies of conflict and intra- and inter-party relations. I leverage evidence from one successful case, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in El Salvador, to illuminate the key factors that facilitated its success, and compare it against a very similar but negative case, the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19) in Colombia, showing where their trajectories diverged. I rely on careful process-tracing analysis and 120 in-depth interviews, combined with data analysis of textual, audio, and visual archive evidence, including private material from former guerrilla fighters and state forces. This strategy informs a rich theoretical model that provides a rare view into the meso- and microfoundations and processes that have facilitated or complicated party durability and effectiveness. The research underscores the value of taking a step back from macropolitical and structural explanations to look at the dynamics of resource acquisition and decision-making by key actors within parties. More specifically, it argues that war and post-war democratic competition are essential to the process of devising the unique symbolic and material resources without which parties cannot function and endure over time.

Authors: Buitrago Arias, W

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-z58oqkrqw
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: politics after war; intra party agency; party building; party politics; democratization; guerrillas to parties; civil society organizations and political parties; conflict derived resources; voting behaviour; violent actors; insurgent successor parties; guerrillas
• Subjects: Interviewing violent actors; Insurgent parties; Insurgency--Colombia; Party building in Latin America; Guerrillas in Latin America; Insurgent successor parties; Political party organization