The Global Field and the Venezuelan State: Restricting Democracy Assistance and International Cooperation within Socialist Venezuela

• In Event: 479 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Global Political Spaces

Abstract

In recent years, several governments have cracked down on civil society organizations (CSOs) by passing laws that prohibit international funding for them. Political sociological theories, such as pluralism, elite theory, and institutionalist theory, have all sought to explain state behavior by examining the power of domestic constituencies. By contrast, international relations theories and theories of globalization have looked to supranational phenomena and relations between countries in order to explain state behavior. In this paper, I utilize Bourdieusian field theory and examine both the Venezuelan government’s domestic and international social networks in order to explain why the Venezuelan government passed this legislation when it did. Since 2002, the Venezuelan government had criticized CSOs for receiving international funding. However, it did not pass legislation prohibiting international funding until 2010. I argue that in earlier years the Venezuelan government remained keyed into relations involving groups that pressured the government to reconsider this sort of legislation, including Western European and North American governments as well as domestic CSOs that rely on international funding. By 2010, however, the Venezuelan government had prioritized relations with several authoritarian governments and several anti-imperial, Latin American governments whom had already passed similar legislation or were considering its passage. Domestically, the Venezuelan government prioritized relations with local community councils and “popular power” organizations that rely on Venezuelan state funding for their survival. I argue that these shifting sets of relations ultimately allowed the Venezuelan government the political opportunity to pass legislation prohibiting CSOs from receiving international funding when it did.

Author

• Timothy M. Gill, University of Georgia