• DOI:10.1080/03066150.2013.801641
• Corpus ID: 155797108

Shadow space: suicides and the predicament of rural India

@article{Schurman2013ShadowSS,
  title={Shadow space: suicides and the predicament of rural India},
  author={Rachel A. Schurman},
  journal={Journal of Peasant Studies},
  year={2013},
  volume={40},
  pages={597 - 601}
}

• R. Schurman
• Published 1 May 2013
• Political Science
• Journal of Peasant Studies

the democracy to which Paraguay aspires. Throughout the book, Hetherington critiques transparency reforms that seek to depoliticize the public bureaucracy as elitist and perversely anti-democratic. However, to be more precise and fairer to the new democrats, their ideal is not to remove all contestation and politics from society. That would indeed render the project of democratization entirely meaningless. Instead, their goal is to restrict politics to its ‘proper’ place in the electoral and legislative realm, by removing the administration of property titles and other documents from the political realm and by making bureaucracies function according to predictable, technical rules. Thus, while the book levels a seemingly universal critique at the ideal of transparency, readers who are familiar with Paraguay may wonder whether it is only the country’s electoral dysfunction that inevitably makes transparency an ideological tool to insulate elites from the potential political power of the poor. In Paraguay, the rural poor lack autonomous and institutionalized access to state power via the electoral system. There is no peasant party in Paraguay. Campesinos’ interests in redistribution get mediated and co-opted by the clientelist structures of the Colorado and Liberal parties, which inevitably privilege the interests of wealthy property owners. Yet campesinos’ primary power assets remain their numbers and their capacity for political mobilization. A sophisticated new democratic would object that the transparency reforms which Hetherington critiques are anti-democratic only insofar as they close off the bureaucracy as a venue for campesinos to exercise political power without opening the electoral arena. Indeed, as Hetherington alludes to in his brief concluding chapter, the electoral possibilities for campesino inclusion seemed practically non-existent until the 2008 election of Fernando Lugo ended 61 years of one-party rule and gave guerilla auditors and their leftist allies their first real foothold within the state. After Guerrilla auditors went to press, Colorado and Liberal Party leaders expelled Lugo and the incipient Paraguayan left from the State in an impeachment backed by landed interests and widely described by international observers as an ‘institutional coup’. While Hetherington’s speculative hope about the potential for Lugo to promote ‘populist transparency’ at the State level has been disappointed by recent history, his analysis remains indispensable for making sense of that history and of the profound challenges facing democratic inclusion in Paraguay.