Citizenship and agency in the context of Nicaragua’s participatory authoritarianism

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the technologies of participatory authoritarianism (Owen 2020) and how they construct citizenship through discourses and spaces. It further analyses how marginalised citizens generate a sense of citizen agency through recognising their personal and collective agency and constructing alternative narratives. This article theorises marginalised citizenship by drawing on existing theory, and on data generated through participatory research with groups of marginalised citizens in Nicaragua. The research illuminated how ideas, experiences and expressions of citizenship are shaped by governmental discourses and invited spaces of participation, and by citizens’ own subjectivities and histories. The research employed mixed methods including document analysis, key informant interviews, and participatory methods which incorporated sequenced storytelling and collective analysis. This approach identified factors which are generative of citizen subjectivity and agency within participatory authoritarianism.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• agency
• storytelling
• participatory authoritarianism
• Nicaragua

1. Introduction

This article conceptualises and analyses citizenship discourses and spaces in Nicaragua, in the context of the democratically elected but increasingly authoritarian administration of Daniel Ortega (2007). The Ortega government combines participatory discourse and mechanisms with paternalist, clientelist and repressive policies, and is described hereafter as ‘participatory authoritarianism’ (Owen 2020). The article reflects on analysis produced through participatory research conducted with citizens living in marginalised settings. It finds that the promise of citizen agency in the government-invited spaces of the citizen power committees is not realised. Instead, a sense of citizen agency is generated in alternative spaces, when marginalised citizens recognise their personal and collective agency and construct alternative narratives. It also notes the closing of alternative spaces for such processes in the context of deepening authoritarianism.

The Sandinista Front of National Liberation (Sandinista Front hereafter), re-elected in 2007, launched a radical socialist discourse emphasising collective citizen rights and participatory democracy, to be operationalised through the mechanism of citizen power committees (CPCs). These reimagined the ‘Sandinista Defence Committees’, which were created in 1979, drawing on the self-organising neighbourhood groups or ‘civil defence committees’ which had emerged during the 1970s as a support network against the repressive Somoza national guard (Envío 1989). In 1989, these were reoriented to organise and mobilise community participation in local development and national campaigns (such as the national literacy campaign of 1980) and considered by some to be a model of grassroots democracy, and by others a network of neighbourhood surveillance (ibid.). After the Sandinistas lost power in 1989, these continued as ‘community development committees’, largely organised through the Nicaraguan Community Movement which struggled through the 1990s to establish itself as a community-driven non-partisan movement. Recaptured by the Sandinista Front in 2007, these spaces were recentred in a Latin American socialist tradition, nuanced with indigenous and Christian discourses for populist appeal. Ortega presided over the revolutionary government of 1980–84, the creation of the Sandinista Front and its democratic election in 1984, its defeat in 1989, and its re-election in 2007. He remains in power at the time of writing. He introduced reforms to the constitution to allow unrestricted re-election and complete control of state institutions, with his wife and other family members in key political and economic roles. Resistance to these measures was met by widespread protests in 2018 triggered by a proposed increase in pension contributions, which were violently repressed.

To explore the extent to which the Ortega government’s participatory discourses and spaces constitute the possibility of citizen agency (and for whom), I theorise them as ‘invited spaces of participation’ (Gaventa 2006) and technologies of governmental power which shape dynamics between citizens and the state. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality theory (Foucault 1978), Rose (1996) argues that governments use technologies of power, such as discourse to promote certain values and to encourage their internalisation and the emergence of a certain type of self-governing subject. Technologies of governmental power are also deployed through institutional spaces for participation. Gaventa (2006, 26) identifies spaces for participation as crucial to the practices of citizenship, offering opportunities – shaped by power relations – for citizens to ‘affect policies, discourses, decisions and relationships that affect their lives and interests’. Spaces for participation can be conceptualised as a continuum, including ‘closed spaces’ in which decisions are made behind closed doors without citizen involvement; ‘invited spaces’ which are created by government and into which citizens are invited to participate, usually according to a pre-established agenda or format; and ‘claimed’ or alternative spaces, which are established by citizens themselves to discuss common concerns (Gaventa, ibid.). Nicaragua’s CPCs can be understood as invited spaces for participation which, together with governmental discourses, shape the boundaries of who is included, and what practices are allowed. Isin (in Benson 2023) suggests that these technologies dynamically construct citizens as ‘us’ and ‘other’ (‘alterity’).

This article argues that the Ortega administration employs the technologies of government discourse, and government created spaces for participation (the CPCs), to appeal to, control, and discipline its citizens. The government’s rhetoric of participation promises meaningful participation (i.e., increased citizen inclusion, agency, and decision-making over resource allocation and policies that affect them), while in practice the CPCs are experienced as partisan and exclusionary. The study finds that while some marginalised citizens may gain a sense of recognition in these spaces, more often they experience manipulation, and find agency in alternative spaces. The research that this article draws on was conducted between 2015 and 2017. The methodology combined documentary analysis and key informant interviews, with a cooperative inquiry involving storytelling and collective analysis, which enabled participants to analyse their lived experience and identify factors which contribute to their sense of being (or not) citizens. The article is structured as follows: The following section draws on Foucault’s governmentality and Gaventa’s spaces of participation to theorise citizen participation, and on Isin’s acts of citizenship, to introduce a stronger focus on agency. Together, these concepts create a framework for analysis of governmental discourses and invited spaces for citizen participation, and of citizens’ experiences of – and resistance to- these technologies. The methodology is outlined in Section 3, and Section 4 explores how the governable subject is constructed in Nicaragua, through discourse (policies, media, etc.), and in government-invited spaces for citizen participation. Section 5 provides empirical data on the experiences of these discourses and spaces shared by citizens in the cooperative inquiry. Section 6 discusses the contribution of this case to the study of citizenship in Nicaragua, and more broadly.

2. Theorising citizenship and participatory authoritarianism

There is an extensive scholarship on how citizens can exercise their rights through governance mechanisms and institutions for citizen participation (Taylor 2007; Newman 2010); the conditions for effective or ‘empowered’ participatory governance (Fung and Wright 2003); and how citizen participation can improve public services (Bovaird 2007). There is less engagement in the literature with authoritarian states that promote participatory forms of governance. Fiket and Đorđević (2022, 8) suggest that participatory mechanisms in the context of Serbia may be merely an attempt to legitimize the authoritarian government. Dryzek (2009) however suggests that participatory spaces in hybrid regimes may be generative of citizenship and ‘deliberative capacity’. Owen (2020, 423) argues that the study of ‘participatory authoritarianism’ can reveal controlled forms of active citizenship which contribute to effective governance, and a ‘dialogic’ relationship between ‘democratic practices of openness and accountability and authoritarian practices of control and arbitrariness’. An exploration of this dialogic relationship I suggest requires study of how the state discursively constructs citizenship and spaces of citizen participation, and how citizens respond to or contest these (Gaventa 2006).

Governmentality theory offers an understanding how the state shapes citizenship through visible and covert structuring power that disciplines and leads to self-regulation. Foucault (2008) describes such processes as ‘technologies’; collections of rational strategies to achieve a desired end, which can be both formal (laws, invited spaces) and informal mechanisms such as the vocabularies and imaginaries deployed in policymaking and the media. These governmental discourses and spaces shape the boundaries of who can enjoy citizenship rights, and on what terms; neutralising resistance, and residualizing the citizenship of those on the margins (Gaventa 2006); constructing citizens as ‘objects’ of state pedagogy (Newman 2010), and endorsing certain types of ‘active citizenship’ (Ferguson 2010). A governmentality lens enables a focus on the technologies that construct these boundaries, marginalising some from full citizenship rights to create inequities: fragmented citizenship (Samov and Yishai 2018) or differentiated citizenship, through historical processes that legitimise inequalities based on ethnicity, socio-economic status and other identities (Könönen 2018). Isin (in Benson 2023) argues that how citizens are recognised as ‘us’ or ‘other’ is generated through dynamic relationships which are mutable according to ‘genealogy’, historical moments, technologies of governance and strategies of citizenship.

The potential for marginalised citizens to experience agency seems limited in these theorisations. Lister (2013) argues that how social citizenship is articulated ‘from above’ (through laws and policies) shapes how citizenship is experienced and perceived ‘from below’, especially in circumstances of poverty and marginality. Who is recognised in discourses, who can enter invited spaces of participation, and what can be discussed within them: all these shape experiences of citizenship. Yet, these boundaries are not fixed but can be contested as social forces challenge their exclusion (Nyamu-Musembi 2009; Lister 2007). Bevir (2018, 5) points to a ‘neglect of agency’ and reified and monolithic accounts of modern power’ by governmentality theorists. Often taking a macro-level approach (Peck 2013), governmentality theory can lack insight into contextual specificities and everyday lived experience (Brady, 2014). Governmental technologies shape their experiences but may also be resisted in specific, situated ways. Some scholars suggest that identity and citizenship mutually shape each other (Mouffe 1996; Yuval-Davis 1999). In this sense, marginalised citizens come into focus ‘not only as victims which need “inclusion” but as subjectivities’ (Turner 2016, 146). The assertion of citizenship by marginalised citizens signifies a reassessment of devalued identities, and the generation of alternative discourses demanding justice (Kabeer 2005); demands for redistribution and recognition (Fraser and Honneth 2003); and for respect and dignity (Lister 2013). Some scholars suggest that this reframing requires a disruption, which shifts perceptions and generates political subjectivity (Turner 2016; Freire 1972). Such a shift may enable citizens to create alternative narratives to prevailing exclusionary framings of citizenship.

Drawing on this scholarship, I engage governmentality theory with Gaventa’s (2006) ‘spaces of participation’ and theories of citizen agency (Isin 2008; Lister 2015), to analyse how governmental technologies (discourses and spaces) construct citizenship, how this is mutable over time, and whether ‘othered’ citizens experience citizenship agency in Nicaragua’s invited and claimed spaces of participation.

3. Methodology

This research was conducted during 2015–2017 using mixed methods: document and policy analysis, 15 key informant interviews, and a group-based participatory process (cooperative inquiry). The site was selected as a medium-sized, growing city with marked spatial inequalities. The 9 participants for the cooperative inquiry were purposively sought via local community organisations and NGOs, to include people marginalised through poverty, gender, sexuality and disability. The research process combined qualitative and participatory methodologies, such as storytelling (Ledwith and Springett 2010; Wheeler, Shahrokh, and Derakhshani 2020) to enable participants to explore and analyse their lived experience, in dialogue together. It is a way of exploring subjective experiences of marginalised citizens while also building trust, self-value, facilitating dialogue and recognition of difference. I will argue that this process can also reveal citizen agency and build intersectional solidarity.

To explore how the state understands and operationalises citizenship, I reviewed relevant government policies, policy analysis conducted by think tanks and academic institutes, and academic literature. Together, this provided context to the in-depth study conducted through the co-inquiry and generated a priori themes which were applied in the analysis. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 national and local government and civil society actors, including thinktanks and social movement leaders. The interview questions asked how policy frames citizenship rights and practices, the institutional spaces for citizen participation (and how these have evolved), citizens’ potential for agency in these spaces, and whether there are alternative discourses and spaces in which people may act as citizens. Access to state officials was extremely difficult since only the President’s wife is the authorised ‘voice’ of the government, and any state employee or representative who speaks without authorisation risks dismissal. Through my contacts, I was able to speak with one advisor to a government ministry, and a civil servant working in central government. Both requested complete anonymity.

The cooperative inquiry explored participants’ experiences of belonging, inclusion, power and powerlessness, in order to dig more deeply into citizen agency. In a cooperative inquiry, participants research into their own lives in cooperation with others, through cycles of mutual questioning and reflection, opening up possibilities for change (Heron 1996; Heron and Reason 2001; Howard, Ospina & Yorks, 2021). These cycles make it an effective methodology for inquiring into invisible norms and structures, hence appropriate for inquiry into governmentality and agency. The cooperative inquiry involved an extended digital storytelling (DST) process, rooted in Ledwith and Springett’s (2010) three-step approach to participatory action research: storytelling, dialogue and critical reflection. The DST process involves a series of steps: storytelling, storyboarding, constructing a narrative, selecting images, and giving voice and shape to the layered audio-visual story product (Lewin 2011). Developing the story accesses people’s individual narratives about how they make sense of themselves and their agency in relation to other actors (Ledwith and Springett 2010, 103). Through the group activities, sharing and commenting on the stories as they are developed and analysing them to identify critical factors, enables individual stories to be witnessed (an important step in building agency) and for these to be brought into dialogue. Finally, the process enables ‘counternarratives’ to be identified, surfacing stories that have been marginalized, excluded, or forgotten in the telling of official narratives (Peters and Lankshear 2013). In practice, extending the DST process from what is usually a week’s intensive workshop to a series of meetings over 9 months, increased the possibility of dialogue.

At the end of the fieldwork period, all the empirical data was gathered and analysed. Audio recordings of interviews and inquiry workshops, as well as field notes, were transcribed, coded and analysed. All the material including visual (rivers of life, flipcharts from brainstorming sessions, digital stories) were collected into N Vivo. Much of the data and quotations shared in this article come from the inquiry workshops. The analytical framework was developed iteratively, and the cooperative inquirers were involved in the analysis, identifying emerging themes and making meaning about their experiences. Their categories were integrated into the coding framework, and additional themes emerged during the coding.

4. Construction of the governable subject in participatory authoritarianism

This section explores how the governable subject is constructed through discourse (policies, media communications), and in government-invited spaces for citizen participation, in the context of Nicaragua, and how this subject has changed over time. The Somoza dynasty rose to power in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century and introduced reforms to ensure its continuation. After decades of conflict, popular resistance grew into a movement which overthrew the repressive regime of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. A revolutionary government was formed by the Sandinista Front, introduced a new rights-based constitution which recognised social, labour and communal as well as individual rights (Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua 1987), and established community-based mechanisms for realising and protecting these rights (ibid). The Sandinista Front received support from the USSR and Cuba but was viewed as a national threat by the Reagan administration in the USA, which introduced a trade embargo and covertly supported ‘Contras’ (counterrevolutionaries) to mount armed opposition to the government. During this period, government discourse constructed the idea of the participatory citizen defined through their collective participation in the revolutionary project. Tens of thousands of young people participated in the national literacy campaign, which reduced illiteracy from 52% to 12.5%, and inspired a generation of Nicaraguans with practical experience and belief in participatory citizenship (Vanini 2015).

The Sandinista Front lost the 1989 elections to Violeta Chamorro, the first female leader of the Americas, who established a government of national unity and was seen as a solution to the division in the country. This, and subsequent liberal governments through the 1990s promoted progressively more liberal economic policies and notions of citizenship and state-civil society relations, reflecting global (neo)liberal democratic trends of a reduced role for the state, an expanded role for NGOs in delivering local development projects, and an oversight role for citizens through participation in municipal development committees (discussed further below).

The Sandinista Front was re-elected in 2007, with Daniel Ortega again as president. While Ortega won the election, this was in large part due to a power-sharing ‘pact’ with the Constitutional Liberal Party which lowered the required threshold for election, allowed presidential re-election and the centralisation of power through political appointment (Dye and Close 2004). To regain support from the largely Catholic population, Ortega had also converted to Catholicism and achieved a political alliance with Cardinal Obando y Bravo, who endorsed him in the 2006 election campaign. The Ortega government reformed the constitution drawing on the earlier framing of citizenship as participatory, within a national project to contest neoliberal and neo-colonial hegemony, and in opposition to the processes and spaces of neoliberal governance that had emerged between 1990 and 2006. A discourse of ‘Citizen power’ and ‘el pueblo presidente’ (presidency of the people) re-constructed citizenship as a political endeavour focused on a unified collective and mass participation ‘in the political, economic and social life of the country’ (Article 48, Government of Nicaragua 2007a). Decree No. 112–2007 (ibid.) establishes an explicit link between ‘the rights of the Nicaraguan people and the exercise of participatory democracy’.

The Sandinista Front’s current discourse revisits the ideals of the revolution of 1979 and the Sandinista revolutionary government’s discourse (1979–1989) which challenged the country’s colonial and Catholic legacy and promoted a sense of collective citizenship agency:

During the revolution, there was an idea – true or false – that we were constructing citizenship in the sense that people were grasping how to transform their own lives, their own history – I don’t know how real that was, but the feeling was real for lots of people […] the idea that change is possible and is not in the hands of destiny or divine design. (CSO leader, interview)

The Ortega Government discourse also drew on ‘buen vivir’ traditions of indigenous cultures in Latin America, a central concept in indigenous struggles against neoliberal policies (Merino 2016) which has travelled across the region and has been translated into national policy discourses. In Nicaragua, it was tailored to a typically informal Nicaraguan expression (‘vivir bonito’ live nicely), a cosy discourse suggesting a paternalist relationship between the government and its citizens. This hybrid discourse bridged socialist, religious, rights and indigenous ideologies, cleverly positioning itself on the radical left and distancing itself from critiques of the Latin American izquierda permitida that has accommodated neoliberalism Webber and Carr (2013), while embracing Christian and indigenous values to appeal across constituencies. Vivir bonito was effective because its blend of terms appealed to a sense of Nicaraguan identity, rooted in an informal family-oriented culture, enduring clientelism and Christian faith, and a pride in Latin American identity vindicated by the upsurge of recognition of indigenous culture.

However, there is a conflict between this discourse of citizens as participatory actors called on ‘to participate in the integral development of the nation in a direct and active way’ (Decree 112–2007), and the paternalism of its delivery. The President’s wife (Vice-President since the 2011 elections) was appointed as the head of the system of citizen participation, and delivers daily speeches to the nation, broadcast on TV and radio. While government decree constructs citizenship in terms of rights, welfare programmes are implemented through patronage networks or as ‘gifts’ from the President and his wife, reinforcing citizens’ role as dependent beneficiaries and requiring them to be grateful rather than empowered to exercise their citizen rights:

It’s a deeply regressive process they’re inculcating us in, that someone is doing us a favour, that things come to us from heaven or even from ‘parents’, from a mum and a dad, because every day there’s the mum on the radio at 11am saying ‘thanks to God that things are going nicely, let us praise God, and the government of Commander Ortega!’. (social movement leader, interview)

How governments shape citizens as governable subjects has been argued to take place through technologies of governmentality. Discourse is one such technology, as discussed above. However, the state also regulates through invited spaces for citizen participation – the second technology that is considered in this paper.

Spaces of citizen participation

Government-created or ‘invited’ spaces of citizen participation establish the parameters of participation of the ‘good’ citizen. To study these spaces is to understand the underlying principles of state–citizen relations held by the government. As explained above, spaces of citizen participation in Nicaragua have changed over time, reflecting government ideology. The Sandinista Defence Committees of the 1980s through which the government facilitated mass participation and collective action ceased to function in the 1990s. This link between government and citizens was not replaced with newly invited spaces, and people took to street protests as a way to engage with decision makers. Growing international cooperation funding for CSOs enabled them to operate as local service providers and, increasingly, to provide technical support for citizens’ advocacy and monitoring of public services. The Municipal Development Association successfully lobbied for the creation of the Nicaraguan Law of Citizen Participation (Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua 2003), which formalised the duty of local authorities to promote the participation of citizens, CSOs and other local actors in local governance, through the Municipal Development Committee (Howard and Serra Vasquez 2011; Serra Vasquez 2008).

Viewed as a neoliberal arrangement by the incoming Ortega government in 2007, the Law of Citizen Participation was immediately reformed to create the CPCs (Decree 112–2007), institutionalising the participation and action of citizens at neighbourhood level. Each CPC elects a coordinator to represent the needs of the community to municipal government in five sectors: women, health, transport, children and young people. Gender parity is required. This structure is reproduced at municipal level, joined by representatives from the Health and Education ministries, to form the Sandinista Council for Human Development (interview with Sandinista policy advisor, March 2015). The structure is replicated at departmental (provincial) level, and at the national level sits within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Family headed by Rosario Murillo, the President’s wife.

For many Sandinistas, the CPCs were welcomed as a return to the revolutionary participation of the 1980s. Some respondents active within the structures enthused about how the mechanism created a direct link between citizens and government:

The [CPCs] aren’t just the group of eight people – the [CPC] is the whole population, because the population has close communication with the [CPC], so they can come to a meeting and say what problems they’re having, and the [CPC] tells the council what the problems are and how they can be addressed. (local government officer, interview)

Another commented on the degree of party control which they felt undermined participation:

I was political secretary in my community and I resigned because I didn’t want to do what they told me to do, to deceive people and tell them that they can decide [in the CPC], when the decisions are already taken under the table, which means that power of the people is the biggest lie’. (community leader, interview)

This reflects the fact that, despite the discourse of decentralisation, there has been a recentralisation of the direction and management of public services. Resources are centrally held and managed, and citizens are expected to participate in monitoring these services locally, and directly inform the President. According to a senior government respondent:

If parents experience a problem, they can write directly to the President. Often the County Delegates of the Ministry don’t solve problems, which is why parents write to the President directly. We send a report to the Presidency every day to inform on all issues and situations in the area of education. (Senior Politician, interview)

A reflection of the Sandinista Front’s pact with the Catholic Church during its electoral campaign, in 2014 the legal framework of the CPCs was reformed to sit within the Family Code, and citizen power restyled as ‘Cabinets of the Family, Community and Life’ (Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua 2014), ‘inspired by Christian values, socialist ideals and solidary practices’ (Article 32, Family Code).¹ This signalled a growing conservatism and confusion of rights and family values. Reshaped by this moral discourse of family, community and church, the citizens’ rights and empowerment agenda has been progressively undermined by paternalist and gender-regressive policies. The new discourse promotes the CPCs as a ‘model of Christian, socialist and solidary values’ at the locus of a somewhat mystical community where people ‘reflect and work together, promoting family values and unity; self-esteem and esteem; responsibility; rights and duties; communication; coexistence; understanding and community spirit so as to achieve consistency between what is, what is thought and what is done’ (ibid.).

Most respondents viewed this as the introduction of a moralising agenda and shrinking of space for dialogue and the expression of alternative views. Issues experienced by participants which undermine their capacity to fully contribute as citizens, such as homophobia and gender-based violence, are not addressed by the government, which has cut the budget for Women’s Police Stations, and in practice decriminalised GBV by channelling complaints to the CPCs to be addressed through mediation with the local priest (the ‘judiciary diocesan facilitator’). As one respondent observed:

They talk about family and community, and the community substitutes citizenship. This is because the concept of citizenship implies rights … whereas the concept of family and community doesn’t correspond to rights. (CSO director, interview)

Another CSO respondent raised concerns about accountability, given that the CPCs control access to social benefits, and party cadre have discretion to choose who to put forward for programmes, so that ‘what needs to be done or said is determined by what the Party wants to achieve, not what the citizen wants to achieve’ (CSO leader, interview). Another viewed the CPCs as ‘a system of participation which has taken over all spaces and possibilities for participation […] there’s an instrumental purpose to this system that has turned it into a mechanism for social control (CSO leader, interview). Participants in the cooperative inquiry who had participated in a CPC, questioned their promise of ‘citizen power’. Sara² joined the CPC with great enthusiasm to take up a role as community counsellor. She was deeply disillusioned when she discovered that she was expected to work for the Party, not for the community:

I was so happy because that was what I had studied and wanted to do, but I went to the first meeting [of the CPC] where they told me that we would be carrying out activities about the upcoming elections. So, I resigned … there are no roles in the [CPC] now, only Party work. (Sara, interview)

Carolina questioned: ‘so if the kid doesn’t belong to the Party, he can’t study, so how is it that the grants aren’t for all the people? This isn’t any kind of citizenship’ (Carolina, DST workshop).

Yet, for many Nicaraguans who are devout Christians and supporters of the Sandinista revolution, it is a powerful mix that merges faith in God with Sandinismo. A member of a Municipal CPC explained that ‘improvements happen in our neighbourhoods because God has permitted it’. The participatory citizen constructed in this discourse is Christian, socialist and solidary, and participates via a single mechanism (the CPC), incentivised and directed from the Presidency. These technologies of discourse and spaces of participation work together to construct citizenship conditional of party membership and loyalty, and reinforce clientelism through their discretionary selection and distribution processes. Those who have doubts about the CPCs may continue to engage but not to practise direct democracy: ‘People just go to get their piece of zinc and they keep quiet, there’s no activism anymore’ (Sandinista Youth member of Family Cabinet, interview).

5. Experiences of citizenship

The cooperative inquiry process enabled a group of marginalised citizens to generate knowledge about the impact of these discourses and government-invited spaces of citizenship in their own lives. The digital stories drew on visual and creative methods and surfaced affective as well as cognitive forms of knowledge. The process began by drawing and sharing ‘citizenship rivers of life’, which quickly surfaced common experiences of participation and marginalisation (including in most cases, gender-based violence), which shaped their sense of citizenship. The stories identified how working with and for others within the CPC and other spaces in the community, can provide a sense of self-worth. Carolina’s story describes how working with young people in the community through her local CPC, makes her ‘feel like a positive citizen, because my views are listened to and valued’. Maria explained how community health promotion (working with a community organisation, not the CPC) ‘helped me to get out of a place where I was living with no self-esteem, where I wasn’t me, I didn’t have rights, and once I got organised in my community I began to identify [with this work]’ (Maria, interview). Rosa similarly gained confidence through helping others in the community: ‘When they recognise your work for the community you feel good’ (Rosa, River of Life workshop). However, a factor that resonated across the stories was a sense of powerlessness as citizens, which they related to the lack of recognition of their social and economic realities.

Nicaragua’s history of revolution and mass participation created expectations around collective action and a collective sense of citizenship which endured through the 1990s and contributed to the protest marches of 2018 which brought young people, environmental, women’s and LGBT movements onto the streets in solidarity with pensioners (the trigger of the protests was the government’s proposal to reduce pension benefits by 5%). The co-inquiry group discussions highlighted the greater emphasis given by contemporary citizens to identities, gender, sexuality and how these intersect with poverty to shape citizenship. Jaime (an older male LGBT activist), speaking during the group analysis of the digital stories, observed the significance of history:

We shouldn’t lose perspective about the context, we each live our own experience and shouldn’t compare them, but we need to understand the context. The generation pre-1990s lived through a longer process of identity formation because the process we lived through forced us to lose our own identities in order to form a collective identity, because that was the philosophy of the system, of the revolution, but in the process you realised that this construction of collective identity meant that we had to suppress our individual freedoms and rights. Thinking about this process is painful too, you realise how you felt manipulated as a person.

Lola (also in her 50s) has a similar historical perspective, highlighting the gap between the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1980s, and again in the 2010s, and her own reality.

Let’s be honest. Those people I saw dressed in olive green on the 19^th of July in the Square in Managua [the anniversary of the Revolution], it’s the same people who are the oligarchs of today and I say, what happened to what we fought for? Remember, that’s what makes me feel powerless, because I can’t change it. (Lola, DST workshop, Matagalpa)

Involved in her adolescence in the Nicaraguan insurrection and revolution, in her digital story she speaks of the citizenship gained through her sense of belonging and activism in the early years of the revolutionary government. She describes how she was later marginalised because of her sexual identity (‘they trod on my rights and denied them’). Her response to the hypocrisy she perceives in the current administration and spaces of participation, is to work directly in her community, helping others and circumventing the CPC.

What becomes apparent is that when gender or other identity-based inequalities or violence are experienced, and the discourses and invited spaces of government fail to acknowledge these issues or provide suitable support, people feel increasingly marginalised. Rosa described her citizenship as invisibility: as a survivor of domestic violence and single parent in poverty she describes ‘not feeling that you’re visible: the problem is that you can exist, but what if no-one sees you?’ (DST workshop). Maria, an experienced community organiser, illustrated her feelings of isolation while living with domestic violence using a photo of herself facing a wall; ‘I didn’t feel like I was a full citizen because I was living in silence, darkness, fear, and shame’ (Maria, digital story).

However, the stories of citizenship illuminate how marginalised citizens in this context understand their actual and potential citizen agency. The stories sketch pathways towards citizen agency from a place of marginality, which requires first re-building a sense of self-worth (VeneKlasen and Miller 2002). Bartolo clearly articulates this pathway:

Why are we talking about whether I feel like a citizen or not, in a social world, in a state, in a country? First, we need to go back to our personal experiences, and ask if we really respect ourselves, love ourselves – I’m talking about the personal level, let’s respect ourselves. (Bartolo, DST workshop, Matagalpa)

In the group discussions, participants recognised how their journeys move from powerlessness to a sense of being a citizen, through a process of building self-worth often through struggle:

Maria: Something I liked [in our stories] is … the struggle to validate yourself as a citizen, because it’s something that not all of us have, and it’s a big struggle to achieve it. Because when we began with the stories, and we talked about citizenship and said that it’s this, it’s that, it’s about identity – citizenship becomes like a form of power, and you begin to identify with what you’re going to do which is to fight for rights. This is what I see in the stories.

Lola: So, what being a citizen is, it’s about this spirit of struggle, right?

Maria: When you tell your story, it’s there, there’s your spirit of struggle. We can see it in people’s life, in the workplace, in the neighbourhood. (Dialogue on watching the digital stories)

Participants identified moments in their stories when this struggle finds a turning point, when the storyteller recognises that something must change. Bartolo suggests that speaking out against one’s lack of power, is an act of citizenship – a way of taking power back:

When we start to say that we don’t agree with this, that we don’t like it, as Carolina said in her story, and as all of us have said in our stories, when we say ‘No! It shouldn’t be this way!’ then by saying that, we are taking action. (Bartolo, power workshop)

This process involves moving from specific claims to framing concerns as injustices:

The use and abuse of power is common in the spaces we have been in and live in … feeling unsafe in a school, in a workplace, feeling unsafe and having to watch your back at different levels in case you’re not satisfying the whims of whoever has the power, be they your boss, or your teacher or the government. (Bartolo)

But not all the stories find their citizenship transformed through recognition of injustice. Ximena’s story begins in an upbeat way, but ends with frustration and exhaustion:

I began university full of enthusiasm, with my white coat and plans to help people that need me. […]

… I’m disappointed with the justice system – my rights as a woman are not protected. I don’t feel that justice is done – there’s so much injustice towards women. I ask for respect. But having to keep asking can wear a human being out. (Ximena, digital story, Matagalpa)

While she sees the injustice around her, Ximena has not experienced a shift in her own agency. She continues to resist but does not feel that anything changes. One explanation is that she has not found the support of a wider collective or organisation which can provide the space in which to develop her emerging political subjectivity in ways that respect her subjectivities as a young woman, single parent, professional. Without this support, she is struggling to build a sense of personal agency. The research process was important for her in this sense, as the group provided a space in which her agency was acknowledged.

The cooperative inquiry process identified how people gain a sense of citizenship through participating – in the CPC and in other community organisations), that their citizenship is limited when they are denied the opportunity to engage or make claims based in their own realities, or when their participation is experienced as manipulated. It also identified elements of citizen agency, which emerge and interconnect across the intimate, community and public realms.

6. Discussion

Viewing the CPCs through a governmentality lens as well as a mechanism for the practice of participatory democracy, exposes the conflicting rationalities observed in the case of (pre-crisis) Venezuelan community participation structures (2014), between grassroots mobilisation and top-down control. The CPCs were conceived as a space of empowered citizen participation (‘citizen power’), yet in practice they constrain citizen agency through clientelist and partisan practices, and the failure to address gender-based inequalities, which limit their potential to address intersectional poverty and undermine women’s agency. Owen (2020) has argued that study of controlled forms of participation within participatory authoritarianism can reveal a dialogic relationship between democratic and authoritarian practices. In the case of the CPCs, the Sandinista Front’s desire to maintain tight control over the mechanism led to a centralised system operated through party structures, which led to the disillusionment of many citizens who do not consider community and party priorities as commensurate. Spaces of participation are shared by power relations – the power of discourse which covertly shapes behaviours, and the more overt power of party cadre to control who accesses resources. The subsequent reshaping of the CPCs as ‘Family Cabinets’ replaced a rights discourse with conservative Christian morality, further reducing the possibilities of citizen power as accountability, and reinforcing a narrative that the citizen who is recognised and rewarded is party faithful, solidary and Christian. Thus, the state has reached further into the intimate spaces of citizenship through its policies, discourses and spaces of participation that regulate at the ‘nexus of biopolitics and sovereignty’ (Oswin and Olund 2010).

‘Citizen power’ cannot be given by the state but requires an accompanying strategy or methodology which enables equitable access and participation in government-invited spaces, enabling more marginalised citizens to build a sense of agency. Without such a methodology, in this context of poverty and clientelism the default mechanism becomes party patronage, and a required conformity with the moralising agenda of the CPC. Yet, despite the reality that being active in the CPC brings material benefits, some research participants had sought alternative or ‘claimed’ spaces of participation with grassroots organisations and movements. In these spaces – unlike in the CPC – they felt themselves to be citizens because they could speak about and take actions to address the social and economic injustices they and others in their communities were experiencing.³ Participants spoke of being able to work on children’s, women’s and LGBT rights – agendas which were suppressed in the CPCs – turning these alternative spaces, into micro-sites of resistance (Bang 2005).

Through the storytelling and analysis process in the cooperative inquiry, the research generated learning about the factors which contribute to citizen agency, suggesting the kind of methodology which needs to accompany spaces for participation. At the personal level, participants identified the importance of rebuilding a sense of self-worth. At the relational level, of gaining respect and recognition from others, which contribute to a sense of belonging to a wider collective or community. And at a structural or strategic level, of developing a sense of the possibility of change, that through one’s actions it may be possible to live more justly, and to realise one’s rights.

In the context of Nicaraguan governmental discourses and the CPCs, marginalised citizens have needed to reframe their experiences of powerlessness to gain this sense of citizen agency. The shift they identify from powerlessness to agency or acts of citizenship, has been theorised by Edmiston and Humpage (2018), Lister (2015), and Isin (in Benson 2023), in terms of moving from the personal to the political, and from the everyday to the strategic. Key in this shift is the reframing of a personal experience or claim as an injustice. When claims are experienced only as personal and everyday, there is resignation, or ‘getting by’. Resistance or ‘getting back at’ mark a shift from the personal to political. The ‘strategic, political’ expression of citizen agency can involve ‘getting organised’, ‘reconfiguring’, or ‘getting out’ (Lister 2015). This spectrum of expressions is illustrated in the stories of citizenship generated in this research. Their acts of citizenship in the participatory authoritarianism of Nicaragua are differentiated. Maria and Rosa speak of relational acts of citizenship through which they are challenging injustice through small acts of solidarity, for example helping others in the community to challenge violence or discrimination. Others like Ximena lack this relational agency, and while they have come to recognise their rights and reframe their personal struggle as being against injustice, resign themselves to getting by. Others are contesting prevailing citizenship discourses which exclude gender and other justice claims (Heumann 2014), thereby generating strategic agency as they speak out against injustice. For several participants, their citizenship agency translated into mobilising in protest, and they had to ‘get out’ after the 2018 repression and go into exile.

This study of citizenship in Nicaragua has demonstrated that capacities and dispositions for citizen participation and collective action have endured in Nicaragua over the last 40 years, and across different governmental discourses and mechanisms of participation. At different times, government-invited spaces of participation have facilitated and suppressed different rights claims. Citizens today understand their agency as connected to their intersubjective realities which, when they are not recognised in government discourses and invited spaces, can lead to powerlessness and resignation, but when supported to engage in dialogue in alternative spaces, can lead to a reframing which is generative of agency (Turner 2016; Freire 1972).

More broadly, there is potential in government-invited spaces of participation for marginalised citizens to develop their agency when the mechanism is supported by a methodology which enables authentic dialogue. This requires balancing the structuring of government-invited citizen participation with more flexible processes which recognise and value their knowledge (building self-worth), which enable them to work for and with others in the community (building relational agency), and which allow dialogue around identities, rights and justice. When citizens experience their identity-based rights and claims as side-lined or denied, government-invited spaces are experienced as instrumentalising and alienating. In participatory authoritarian contexts, the repertoire of acts of citizenship is likely to be significantly reduced and public political actions outside of the accepted repertoire are met by repression. However, this research suggests that even in such settings, it is possible for citizens to build a sense of self-worth when this is understood as small acts which contain the germ of political subjectivity. From here, there is a shift in register as Isin notes, from specific claim to a justice orientation, a refusal to be ‘victims’, and a recognition that when the space for making claims is shut down, telling their stories is a way of acknowledging themselves as citizens, and of co-constructing a space of citizenship together.

All mechanisms for participatory governance or ‘invited spaces’ of participation, must grapple with the tension between government prescription and regulation of citizen participation, and space for citizens to self-organise around issues that are important to them. In different political contexts this tension will have more or less scope for dialogue and for citizens to expand the boundaries of what can be discussed and acted upon. Space for dialogue is essential but, despite its aspirations to empower and mobilise the participatory citizen through ‘citizen power’, the participatory authoritarianism of Nicaragua has closed down such space and instead mobilises partisan and clientelist practices.

7. Conclusion

Since this research was conducted, protests in Nicaragua have been met with increasing repression and state violence, indicating a shift from backsliding democracy and authoritarian responsiveness (de Brito, Chaimite, and Shankland 2017), towards dictatorship. Since 2018, the government has chosen repression over concessions (Thaler and Mosinger 2022), and any activity perceived as anti-government is classed as treasonous and leads to jail or repression (I Puig and Serra 2020).

This research conducted in 2015–17 foreshadows this closing down of spaces for citizen participation, despite the government’s discourse of the citizen as ‘active and participatory subject’. The radical idea of the CPCs has been hollowed out into a form of Party control and social conservatism. Yet, through the research process participants articulated their motivation to see themselves – and to be seen – fully as citizens, and identified personal, relational and strategic dimensions to this citizenship. They identified content claims, such as access to state benefits, grants to study, but also justice claims across different intersectional experiences of injustice, such as gender- and sexuality-based discrimination and violence.

Citizenship is shaped and limited by technologies of power which in Nicaragua construct the participatory, party-faithful and moral citizen. But in making these justice claims and articulating alternative narratives, citizens who are marginalised through governmental discourses and practices challenge the boundaries of this citizenship. The potential for them to reshape these boundaries, however, has been curtailed by the increasingly repressive responses to contestation. The agency that they have generated through their personal and collective reflection, through their relational work connecting and supporting others in their communities, may prefigure alternative individual and collective ways of being a citizen that can inform future citizenship when spaces for dialogue reopen.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Professor John Gaventa for commenting on drafts of this article. There are no data associated with this article, in order to comply with the UKRI OA policy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by ESRC doctoral funding.

Notes

1. For consistency and clarity, although the Citizen Power Committees were renamed as Family Cabinets in 2014, I refer to them as CPCs throughout this article.

2. All cooperative inquiry participants are identified using pseudonyms, as agreed with them.

3. At the time of fieldwork (2015), these spaces continued to operate, some below the radar, and with increasingly limited funding since the government introduced restrictions on receiving funding (ICNL 2016). However, at the time of writing (2023), all CSOs have been closed and their assets seized.