The Horizon of Critical Collaboration: Feminist Cogovernance and Movement-State Negotiations in El Salvador

• Date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20918545
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Author: Daniel P. Burridge
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20918545

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 233, Vol. 47 No. 4, July 2020, 150–169

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20918545

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

150

The Horizon of Critical Collaboration

Feminist Cogovernance and Movement-State Negotiations

in El Salvador

by

Daniel P. Burridge

Examination of the negotiated relationships between feminist social movements and

state institutions controlled by the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front

political party in El Salvador based on ethnographic research in the semiurban municipal-

ity of Suchitoto shows that “critical collaboration” characterizes the local feminist move-

ment’s efforts to work alongside state actors in the formulation, implementation, and

oversight of public policies addressing women’s rights, violence against women, and

gender-equitable community development. Theoretically, critical collaboration shows that

civil society actors interested in deepening emancipatory processes under moderate leftist

governments need not be subordinated to constituted state power or contentiously con-

front it. Rather, by pursuing their agendas through critical and autonomous engagement

with ostensibly sympathetic state institutions, feminist movements may engender prac-

tices and demands for flexible and responsive “cogovernance” that radically transforms

elements of the state and society in the long run.

A partir de una investigación etnográfica en el municipio semiurbano de Suchitoto se

hace un análisis de las relaciones negociadas entre los movimientos sociales feministas y

las instituciones estatales controladas por el partido político de izquierda Frente Farabundo

Martí de Liberación Nacional en El Salvador. Se muestra cómo la “colaboración crítica”

ha sido la característica de los esfuerzos del movimiento feminista local para trabajar junto

con los actores estatales en la formulación, implementación y supervisión de políticas

públicas relacionadas con los derechos de las mujeres, la violencia contra las mujeres y un

desarrollo comunitario equitativo en materia de género. Teóricamente, la colaboración

crítica muestra que los actores de la sociedad civil interesados en profundizar los procesos

emancipatorios bajo gobiernos de izquierda moderados no necesitan estar subordinados al

poder estatal ni tampoco confrontarlo. Más bien, al promover sus agendas a través de un

compromiso crítico y autónomo con instituciones estatales aparentemente comprensivas,

los movimientos feministas pueden generar prácticas y demandas de “cogobierno” flexible

y receptivo que, a largo plazo, transformen radicalmente elementos tanto del Estado como

la sociedad.

Daniel P. Burridge is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. His research

interrogates the territorialized relationships between rulers and ruled in Latin America to illumi-

nate globally relevant insights regarding social change, conflict, and governance. He is particu-

larly interested in the interactions between social movements and state institutions under leftist

governments, such as in El Salvador and Nicaragua, where he has done extensive ethnographic

fieldwork for his dissertation, “Reinventing the Left(s) in El Salvador and Nicaragua: Revolutionary

Legacies, Movement-State Negotiations, and Competing Projects of Governance.”

918545LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20918545LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESBurridge / FEMINIST COGOVERNANCE IN EL SALVADOR

research-article2020

Burridge / FEMINIST COGOVERNANCE IN EL SALVADOR 151

Keywords: Leftist governments, Social movement strategy, Feminist movements, El

Salvador, Democracy

As the Latin American pink tide ebbs and the region’s lefts continue to be

reinvented (Motta, 2013), what practical and theoretical insights can be drawn

from this wave of experiments in democratic innovation and redistributive

justice? Scholars have frequently interrogated the radical and social demo-

cratic leftist governments of the pink tide (Ellner, 2014), as well as the social

movements that brought these governments to state power and made up their

social bases (Ross and Rein, 2013; Silva, 2009; Stahler-Sholk,Vanden, and

Kuecker, 2008). Fewer scholars have foregrounded the interactions between

leftist social movements and left-controlled state institutions. Some studies

frame these interactions through dichotomies such as confrontation vs. co-

optation (Prevost, Oliva Campos, and Vanden, 2012) in which movements

either see their struggles absorbed and neutralized by ostensibly sympathetic

state institutions (co-optation) or keep their struggles in the streets and main-

tain their radical agendas (confrontation). While such a binary may apply in

some countries—such as Nicaragua and Ecuador—where governments have

provided movements with little space to maneuver between confrontation

and co-optation (Becker, 2013; Zaremberg, 2012), most movement-state

dynamics in the region play out in the broad “gray zones” (Auyero, 2007)

between these heuristic poles.

As George Ciccariello-Maher (2013) demonstrates in the case of Venezuela,

for instance, popular movements harnessed their explosive constituent power

from below to force the Chávez government to radicalize an initially reformist

project and reconstitute state power. In similar fashion, Evo Morales’s

Movimiento al Socialismo party in Bolivia grew out of the popular rebellions

that toppled neoliberal governments in the 2000s to then collaborate with

diverse movements in implementing new forms of plurinational citizenship

and communal democracy (Cameron, Hershberg, and Sharpe, 2012). However,

in both Venezuela and Bolivia, state attempts to institutionalize the vehicles of

popular power have led to setbacks in revolutionary goals and reductions in

movements’ strategic power vis-à-vis state institutions (Fernandes, 2010;

Oikonomakis and Espinoza, 2014).

Given the difficulties of transcending such verticalist political logics and the

perceived failures of revolutionary processes in the twentieth century, many

movements now pursue greater autonomy from established political actors,

constructing horizontal social relations in territorialized efforts to resist and

replace dominant political and economic structures (Holloway, 2002; Motta,

2013). Importantly, though, autonomy need not always mean disengagement

from formal political institutions. Rather, some movements increasingly work

“within and against the state” so as to transform the bureaucratic and authori-

tarian tendencies of the state itself (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013). Other movements

maintain their own agendas and autonomous spaces while engaging the state

tactically and strategically through “cautious negotiations” that further move-

ment demands while avoiding co-optation (Conway, 2013; Ross and Rein, 2013;

Stahler-Sholk, Becker, and Vanden, 2014).