preview

The Role of Intra-party Opposition in National Liberation Movements

Better Essays

The Role of Intra-party Opposition in National Liberation Movements By and large, in the latter half of the twentieth century a regime change has meant the victory of a leftist national liberation movement over an oppressive power; whether the new regime makes good on its stated purpose of delivering justice to its people has not evidenced such a standard pattern, however. While liberation movements such as the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa were able successfully to convert their role as revolutionary “freedom fighters” into democratic participation in the state (Connell, 9), movements such as Castro’s Cuban Revolution, while accomplishing regime change, failed to deliver a successful state. This paper suggests that …show more content…

Radical Islamic Palestinian nationalist groups, the most prominent of which is Hamas, adamantly resist any concessions to the state of Israel and maintain that the PA should not be negotiating with the Israeli government. While there is little question that Hamas and similar organizations have had both the intent and the effect of erecting impediments on the road to a peace in the Middle East, this paper aims to dispel the notion that Palestinian opposition groups have completely derailed the peace process. Instead, I will argue that the presence of such vehement dissent is a necessary part to a lasting peace accord and to a stable two-state solution, as this intra-party opposition is often the most difficult hurdle to surmount for a national liberation movement that is attempting to rise to state power. To be clear, I argue that a critical first step to running a peaceful democratic state, before territory or infrastructure, is to pacify radical parties in a non-dictatorial fashion; a process by which a new political regime proves itself capable of state governance by tying together the moderate with the extreme.

I further assert that the notion is incorrect that because the PA is born out of the PLO, an organization that employed guerrilla tactics to spoil peace efforts, the new Authority is necessarily an untrustworthy body. I will argue that in the majority of cases, as exemplified by South Africa,

Get Access