The upside of monarchy or the downside of democracy?

Democracy is what people want when they are either so oppressed that they have no voice and are given reason to believe their lives can be made more tolerable by getting that voice. Democracy is also what fairly privileged people (middle-class and upper-middle class) want and expect when politics are routinely done for their relative benefit--even when their side loses an election, their benefits continue at some level. They look around the world and see that countries without democracy frequently have an eviscerated middle class with no voice and few prospects.

But when the masses without privilege seek systemic change, they can frequently be captured by demagogues who promise them exactly what they want in the moment--vengeance and membership on the winning side. Further, when they live in places where elections routinely fail to produce the change they desire, they can be recruited into support for a brutal opposition and help it seek power. They can become weary and distrustful of the promises made by candidates leading up to elections when those promises are proven again and again to be hollow, broken, and buried in excuses and justifications.

For example, during the long civil war in Colombia, peace was promised by candidates who were elected and failed to succeed in achieving the peace people needed to live decent lives. This was the case "during the Belisario Betancur administration from 1984 to 1989, the César Gaviria administration from 1991 to 1992, and the Andrés Pastrana Arango administration from 1998 to 2002" (Sg, 2024, p.2).

Is it any wonder the Colombians, despite their war weariness, grew increasingly intolerant of the political candidates and even of democracy itself? While the politics swung from far right to centrist and back, it finally took a coalition of peace-seeking parties from across the political and military spectrum, assisted by talented international peace negotiators and mediators, to achieve the historical peace accords of 2016, ending the decades of war. 

Is the peace secure? Some analysts warn that the combination of delays in achieving the transitional justice desperately needed by the war victims, coupled with increased politicization of the factions who were parties to the peace process, threaten the fragile peace that succeeded so many decades of militarized massacres, sexual violence as a weapon of war committed by both far right and far left insurgents and paramilitaries, and the radical misery and insecurity visited upon almost all sectors of that poor country.

With the global trend toward more autocracy and the lack of imagination of leaders who reflexively respond to violence with even more violence, places like Colombia are susceptible to the slide back into war and away from democracy. 

In the long term, peace education and conflict transformation training might be the strand of hope from which so much hangs. Reading about the international focus on ending the long war in Colombia (Ury, 2024) shows what is possible, but the rise of anti-democracy strongmen in so many places shows what is also possible. Ultimately, people power and a great deal of development of the talents for negotiating and executing the structural fixes needed to bring peace and stability will be necessary. Structural nonviolence can follow the strategic nonviolence proven to be a path to change in so many cases, but the generalization of the skills and professionalization of peacework may be the key requisite factors in positive sustainable change.

References

Sb, G. (2024). Elite theory and politicization of negotiated settlement: challenges to peace durability in Colombia. Journal of Iberian & Latin American Studies, 1–15. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1080/14701847.2024.2426393 

Ury, William (2024). Possible: How we survive (and thrive) in an age of conflict. Harper Business.