Concluding Remarks

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI Y CATALINA SMULOVITZ

Enforcing the Rule of Law

Pittsburgh University Press

Lugar: Pittsburgh; Año: 2006; p. 344 - 358

What can be learned from the different initiatives of social accountability that have been analyzed in this volume?  Can they help us to shed new light into prevailing diagnosis on the state of democracy in the region? Are social accountability mechanisms changing the ways in which democracies operate in the region? Do they represent a voice strong enough to improve the quality of representative arrangements in Latin America? While the set of experiences that were the focus of the previous chapters might be too limited for challenging long-standing and deep rooted institutional and political practices, they nevertheless serve as an index of a number of important developments that have taken place in many of the region’s civil societies that place an optimistic note on what has so far been a predominantly somber diagnosis about the state of democracy in the region.             A common thread links most of the experiences of societal accountability analyzed in this volume: They show that previously socially tolerated or unquestioned practices are now not only being perceived as injurious, but they are also being readdressed in the form of rights-oriented claims.  Police abuse, governmental corruption, electoral fraud, unequal enforcement of the rule of law, and human rights violations were not uncommon practices in the region. However, only recently they have become the object of social claims and the rallying point of rights- demands oriented toward political authorities. The transformation of these ingrained practices into rights claims, which led to the organization of different sort of civic movements and initiatives to address them, reveals that the notion of citizenship is undergoing important transformations and so are the inherited notions of what constitutes the most adequate institutional environment for the effective exercise of citizenship rights. The different experiences analyzed in this volume – where previously neglected issues are suddenly converted into vociferous rights controversies-- show that in many of the new democracies inherited notions of citizenship are being contested, expanded or redefined.  In so far as the extension and scope of citizenship is not given but contingent to the actions and discourses that social actors exercise in the public sphere, the analyzed experiences provide a space to observe how the frontiers and contents of citizenship in the region are being the object of political contestation.