<p>This dissertation, Inhabiting the City: Citizenship and Democracy in Caracas, asks how multiple modalities of citizenship arise in order to facilitate working-class and middle-class strategies to negotiate formal and informal structures of rights and obligations among individuals, local communities, and the nation-state. By examining mobile and locally fixed practices in multiple sites of Caracas, Venezuela, this work explores the ways that individuals assert claims to political and social rights that are bound to particular spaces of the city. </p> <p>Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in one middle-class and two working class communities, this dissertation explores the discursive formation of citizenships that are based on divergent conceptions of democracy. Although the notions of this mode of political organization are based on understandings of equality in the capital's working-class communities, many middle-class ideas are quite different. In more affluent communities, democratic ideals grounded in equality do not take into account popular notions of meritocracy that reinforce class hierarchy. Although many individuals in Caracas work to produce democratic spaces throughout the city, exclusions persist--and some go largely unnoticed. </p> <p>Finally, I argue that the modes of belonging that many residents employ to negotiate spaces of citizenship vary according to factors such as race, class, gender, age, and geographic location. By analyzing citizenship in a city space that is as divided as Caracas--especially along class lines--I argue that studies of citizenship require attention to cultural transformations that are tied to social, geographic, and political relationships in local spaces. To conceive of the citizen as an individual with ties to the nation-state is too broad a scope to begin understanding the nuances of social and political belonging that ensure active participation within contemporary societies.</p> / Dissertation

Dissertation--Fachbereich Philosophie und geschichtswissenschaft--Universität Hamburg, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 260-283.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Two folded genealogical tables in pocket. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 425-436). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Harold Trinkunas, Jeff Knopf. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-85). Also available online.

What effects do natural resources, and more specifically the revenues from the extraction and sales of commodities, have on the economies of well-endowed countries in Latin America? How does the political administration of natural resource wealth affect the economic trajectories of these developing countries? Under what conditions do countries successfully use political institutions to administer natural resource windfalls prudently? My dissertation addresses these questions and ultimately explains why natural resource wealth is a blessing for the development of some countries and a curse for others. Specifically, I examine the effectiveness of specific government institutions—called Nonrenewable Resource Stabilization Funds (NRSFs or stabilization funds), which help countries to manage the economic challenges associated with relying upon volatile natural resource revenues—in Chile and Venezuela, two natural resource-rich Latin American countries. Although both of these countries created a NRSF, Chile’s has been very successful while Venezuela’s was extremely weak from the outset. My research suggests that the degree of stabilization fund success—which impacts the severity of the resource curse—depends on these institutions constraining political actors from using rents for venal purposes. In turn, I find that the capacity of NRSFs to restrain the passions of self-interested executives is largely a product of the circumstances accompanying the creation of these institutions; that is, the conditions into which these institutions are born impact stabilization fund performance, but not in the way that the traditional literature predicts. In contrast to extant explanations suggesting that NRSF success is dependent upon clear institutional rules or general state capacity, I find that stabilization funds tend to be unsuccessful when political needs drove their creation while these institutions are likely to function well when economic concerns were the impetus for their adoption. I substantiate the case study evidence of Chile and Venezuela with a broad statistical analysis of 20 other countries that have created NRSFs. / text

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This thesis proposes to challenge the assumption that a particular mode of politics known as rentierism is common to all rentier states. We assert that the successful emergence of rentierism is dependent on specific factors in the pre-rentier state period. To support our claim we examine and analyze three modern day rentier states; Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. These case studies allow us to demonstrate that the pattern we call rentierism is not common to all rentier states the mode of politics in both Venezuela and Iran differs significantly from that of Saudi Arabia, the literature's embodiment of rentierism. Moreover, analysis and comparison of the pre-rentier state period for all three cases allows us to propose specific pre-rentier state factors which, we suggest, are essential for the successful emergence of rentierism.

Striving for subsistence, the growing population of Caracas has radically transformed the city in the course of the past fifty years. The inability of the city to respond to the accelerated growth that resulted from mass rural migrations left millions to provide land, shelter and basic services for themselves. The barrios, once thought to be a provisional solution to the housing shortage, are now home to more than half the population of the city. The urban poor now live—out of necessity and through improvisation—on steep slopes, unstable soil and in flood plains. Overcrowded and remote, this very dense urban fabric receives sporadic or no basic services. Without land titles or addresses, and until recently omitted from most census data and official maps, the barrio’s population is excluded from the civic life of Caracas. Sitting between remediation and anticipation, three asynchronous projects elaborate pragmatic responses to the prevailing scarcity of resources while concurrently attempting to reduce the current cycle of poverty, violence and exclusion. In their ability to be informally adapted, the schemes test the capacity of popular manifestations of civic life to transform basic infrastructure into collective space. To overcome the precariousness that characterizes the barrios and incorporate them into the existing political mechanisms of the city, the projects are conceived as incremental frameworks that contribute to the physical integration of the ‘informal’ barrios to the ‘formal’ city. Working with water and waste infrastructure, I argue through these projects that architecture can build on the universal nature of necessity to frame a model of civic space­ generated out of the complexity of the barrios and on the auspice of promises.

This dissertation analyzes global telecommunications liberalization in the context of the transition to an economy and society based on the production, use and exchange of information. It examines the role of the ITU and the WTO in that process and addresses the question of the extent to which globalization and telecommunications liberalization can contribute to development in an increasingly unequal world. It also studies in detail the shift in the institutional regime of telecommunications in Venezuela, whose Telecommunications Bill is analyzed in light of the regulatory principles outlined in the Reference Paper and Venezuela's commitments under the Fourth Protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). We provide recommendations aimed at adapting the regulatory framework that is currently being discussed to new global market realities without ignoring Venezuela's development concerns and regulatory capabilities.

Zugl.: Heidelberg, Univ., Diss., 2006