This dissertation traces how "Alternative Dispute Resolution" (ADR) traveled from corporate boardrooms, World Bank policy conferences, the U.S. State Department, and Harvard Negotiation Program to the dusty neighborhoods of El Alto, Bolivia. Based on 17 months of ethnographic research in foreign-funded legal aid centers, conflict resolution programs, and the criminal courts in El Alto and La Paz, I show how the unfolding (geo)politics of conflict resolution programs have become entangled with Andean kinship practices, regional political tactics, and postcolonial governance projects alike. Since the 1990s, foreign donors have targeted countries in Latin America to strengthen institutional democratic channels and the formal legal system -- two separate but related projects aiming to bolster liberal democratic rule and to foster the spread of market capitalism. In the wake of a 2003 uprising in the city of El Alto, Bolivia, foreign donors pointedly shifted their attention away from institutional capacity building to transforming individual capabilities for conflict resolution. One of their flagship approaches to strengthening democratic principles and practices in El Alto was to sponsor ADR programs throughout the city: to promote a "culture of peace" against El Alto's supposed "culture of conflict." Foreign donors have advanced ADR as both a substitute to the backlogged formal legal system and as a means to instill Alteños with deliberative democratic temperaments. Yet since 2008, ADR and allied democracy promotion programs have become ensnared in a larger national debate over who sets the terms of democracy and what justice should look like in plurinational Bolivia. I argue that foreign aid ideologies about how justice should be enacted frequently chafe against local meanings of conflict, coercion, and political engagement in the city of El Alto, producing ironic moments and unexpected tactics – especially among women. In particular, I examine the complex ways that residents of El Alto relate to ADR as they seek to ameliorate economic insecurity and mounting debts among neighbors and kin. Yet even as Alteños utilize ADR as a stopgap measure, they clamor for a broader conceptualization of justice – and a democratic system capable of redressing structural forms of violence.
Ellison, Susan Helen,
"Mediating Democracy in El Alto: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia"
(2013).
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z089145X
