On Pacted Transitions
Thinking through future trajectories in Venezuela
Precis/TL;DR: in which I point readers to a new article discussing the question of how to regime change in the context of recent events in Venezuela.
‘Pacted Transitions’ and Venezuela’s Future Regime Transformation
The kind people at FUSION gave me the opportunity to write about potential trajectories for regime change in Venezuela and what they (may) entail. It starts like so…
The recent capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has resulted in renewed interest on what ‘regime change’ looks like when done from the outside. A great deal of commentary has fixated on whether the action was justified or how we should judge it in relation to the international system Yet lying in the background is a more neutral question: what does a transition away from the Maduro regime likely look like?
It is useful to think through the future trajectories of potential regime change in Venezuela for a variety of reasons, although for other reasons it is slightly more complicated than one might expect. This essay therefore explicitly ignores all policy, decision-making, or assessment elements to ongoing events in Venezuela. Instead, it tries to put some meat on the analytic bones of how we should think about the coming days, weeks, and months.
What we are left with is a series of plausible options for political transition, the most likely of which so far seems to be what political scientists term a ‘pacted transition.’ That is, a gradual, negotiated reformatting of the regime that keeps at least some of the old elite in place for a time while beginning a ticking clock towards structural regime change.
Read the rest here!
That’s all from me for now!
- Julian
My initial bewilderment as to the foreign policy aims, has given way to some form of appreciation of a likely attempt at reconfiguration of the Venezuelan and US relationship by some form of negotiation. Much hidden from view. This was a useful framework to hang that ‘appreciation’. We shall see how it pans out.