Counterterror Offensives for the Ghost War World by Chasdi Richard J.;

Author:Chasdi, Richard J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Case of Counterterror in Authoritarian

Democracies and an Authoritarian Regime:

Basic Contours of the Counterterror

Practices of Three Nation-States

Introduction

The purpose of this second chapter of the data analysis is to present findings for counterterror practices that operate within the context of political systems which are not examples of western style liberal democracies. The first objective is to present and interpret a set of empirical findings about the contours of counterterror practices for two nation-states that are “authoritarian democracies,” namely the Russian Federation and Turkey. The second objective is to present and interpret empirical findings for an “authoritarian” system, namely Peru, for the time that President Alberto Fujimori was at the helm of state between 1990 and 2000. Peru was selected as a case study because of the rich data set available as a consequence of concerted and sustained terrorism carried out by the two primary Peruvian terrorist groups active in the political fray at that time. Those two terrorist organizations were the Shining Path, otherwise known as Sendero Luminoso, and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, otherwise known as the Movimento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru or MRTA. From the start, it should be clear that since the “authoritarian” system category is represented by only one case study, the findings are not definitive, but merely more suggestive of what counterterror practices within the context of “authoritarian” systems are all about.

When democracy is described, one underlying theme that is commonplace to note is that democracy varies according to the political and social settings in which it is found. In the broader sense, the central notion is that there is no one particular blueprint for the structural shape of democratic government and institutions. For Dahl, that idea traces an arc back to Aristotle’s writings in his work, The Politics. As Dahl tells us, Aristotle is one of the “mild adversaries” of democracy, and it is Aristotle himself who describes five different types of democratic systems that can be distinguished from one another based on several different characteristics. Those characteristics include a political condition where “the law is the final sovereign,” by contrast to a condition whereby “the people . . . is the final sovereign.” For Aristotle, other defining characteristics of that “democratic constitution” include the heritage or “descent” of the “citizen,” and a set of “property qualifications” that might be necessary in order for a “citizen” in a democracy to acquire political office.1

At a functional level, one way of thinking about the structural shape of the “authoritarian democracy” framework revolves around the notion of centralization, and the imposition by the ruling political elite of acute constraints on certain aspects of the democratic process. Such constraints are oftentimes couched as a necessary condition essential to preserve the integrity of the state, or its national security interests, or both. Those constraints include, but are not necessarily limited to, the constraint of civil liberties which are sacrosanct in western style liberal democracies, such as the right to assemble, religious preference and practice, and freedom of speech. In addition,

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