Democratic transparency pacts on defense: assessing change in civilian access to military information in Brazil and Mexico

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, Karina Furtado
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do FGV (FGV Repositório Digital)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10438/18848
• topic: Transparency in defense; Institutional change; Civil-military relations; Mudança institucional; Transparência em defesa; Relações civis-militares; Cambios institucionales graduales; Transparencia en defensa; Relaciones cívico-militares; Administração pública; Relações entre civis e militares; Desenvolvimento organizacional; Transparência na administração pública

What were the conditions that generated change in the civilian access to military records in Brazil and Mexico? Through these case studies, this dissertation explores in depth how these changes occurred and what were the strategies used by change-agents to promote or refute change. The study presents a discussion about the concept of transparency and how it can be properly applied to restricted documents of the armed forces, using the literature on concept formation. In addition, the theory of Gradual Institutional Changes and process tracing methods in order to undertake the historical analyzes of both cases. In both case studies, I concomitantly analyze the course of civil-military relations and transparency reforms in the XX Century and the beginning of the XXI Century. The study concludes that the changes in Brazil followed a layering pattern predominantly, with a long period of gradual reforms from 1988 to 2011. Mexico in turn presented the same mode of institutional change, nevertheless, political hegemony and the cooptation model of civil-military relations of the country leaded it to less, but more drastic changes. Both countries present many challenges to transparency in defense, which is addressed in the final conclusions.