Social Netwar, Fifteen Years On

In 1994, a hitherto unheard-of rebel group led by a pipe-smoking press-hound forever changed Mexico's political system and pointed the way to a new kind of activism and insurgency. The Zapatistas, rising on behalf of Chiapas peasants, transformed their local insurgency into a globalized "netwar" targeted at the credibility and will of the Mexican government. In the process, the Zapatista leader Subcommandante Marcos became a global celebrity of the nascent anti-globalization movement and coerced the Mexican government into agreeing to expansive land reform.

The Harvard International Review (HIR) takes a look at the results of the Zapatista netwar fifteen years on and find little long-term change in the everyday lives of Chiapas peasants:  

"The peasants of Chiapas today face bleak economic conditions. State GDP has largely been stagnant since the 1990s, and the poor states of Mexico’s South have, as a result, fallen further behind the rest of the country. The solution for most young, male peasants, is increasingly migration to the United States. Chiapas has moved from the bottom third to the top third of states receiving international remittances during this period.. ...The land reforms of the mid-1990s have not brought economic self-sufficiency, because the redistributed land is of low quality, and has been sub-divided into plots that are simply too small to yield enough for survival. All of this has happened at a time when the Mexican state has offered little in the way of subsidies to small farmers, and has also failed to offer an alternative development path that would move Chiapas up the value chain.

...In spite of changes in political institutions, such as democratic elections, or decentralization, political practice at the state level in Mexico continues to be dominated by patron-client relationships and high discretion on the part of politicians. Thus, even though the PRI has been humbled, and new resources have been made available to Chiapas, and even though indigenous peasants have entered politics, dysfunctional institutions and corruption persist. The result is a failure to ameliorate basic inequalities. These findings are consistent across states as different as Oaxaca, Mexico and Chiapas."

Much of this, of course, is tied to the larger problem of Mexico's political system. But it does demonstrate the difficulty of netwar groups to sustain campaigns after the "culminating point" has been reached. The report notes that the Zapatista response once they gained power has mainly focused on building parallel state institutions that are not economically viable. At the same time, the growing removal of the Zapatistas from Mexico society in these parallel zones reduces their influence and pressure over larger Mexican politics. The Zapatista social netwar succeeded is because they created a "netwar" that nationalized and globalized their campaign, spreading their influence over all of the Mexican state. Once they disconnected themselves from the campaign they created, HIR points out that they "missed an opportunity to build a broad movement to reform the state."

Comments

[david ronfeldt]

you make significant points about this spreading mode of conflict. i particularly like your observation that the Zapatista movement demonstrates “the difficulty of netwar groups to sustain campaigns after the ‘culminating point’ has been reached.”

i didn’t know about the harvard conference until i saw your post. many thanks for reporting on it.

by now, i’ve looked at the post over there, and gotten fired up with a few of my own thoughts. i’ve also remembered that john arquilla and i wrote a postscript in 2007 about the zapatista netwar that wasn’t published in english. it still reads pretty well, partly because it makes some points about netwar and counternetwar that are similar to your own.

so, rather than clutter up your blog or the harvard blog with a long comment, i’ve gone and posted about this at my blog, and appended the postscript. if you want to take a browse, it’s at
http://twotheories.blogspot.com

and here i thought my next post would be an analysis of castro’s cuba from a timn perspective. once again i’ve put something aside and gone back to my old attraction to mexico. how unexpected.

onward.

[A.E.]

Ah, I'll check that out.

Thanks!