This book explores the frameworks underlying different notions of democracy, and how these influence political decisions.

Though scholarly attention to democracy promotion is increasing, there is still little comparative and theoretically-based work on the protagonists of democracy promotion. This book investigates the motives that drive democracy promotion in a comparative and theoretically oriented manner, exploring how democracy promoters deal with conflicting objectives and the factors that shape their behaviour. It also addresses the more policy-oriented debate on the contemporary challenges to democracy promotion, focusing on US and German policies towards three kinds of challenges: the emergence of ‘radical’ leftist governments in Bolivia and Ecuador, the political rise of Islamist movements in Turkey and Pakistan, and the consolidation of (semi-)authoritarian rule in Belarus and Russia. In each case, North-Western democracy promoters have been confronted with serious conflicts of objectives between security, economic interests and democracy promotion. The analysis and comparison of such situations in which democracy promoters have to deal with competing objectives and make tough decisions provides powerful evidence as to the factors that shape democracy promotion. The Comparative International Politics of Democracy Promotion will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, comparative politics, democratization studies and foreign policy.

How do different meanings of the concept of ‘democracy’ operate in democracy promotion? How do conceptual decisions influence real political events? How is policy and reflection on democracy promotion shaped by the way different practitioners and scholars understand democracy? The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion explores the way in which the meaning, content and context of ‘democracy’ are interpreted by different actors in democracy promotion, and how these influence political decisions. Introducing a theoretically new approach to the study of democracy promotion, the volume shows how the alternate ways that democracy can be understood reflects specific interpretations of political and normative ideals, as well as being closely tied to social power relations, interests, and struggles between political actors. With original contributions from some of the most prominent specialists on democracy promotion and democratization, the book examines a number of concrete cases of democracy promotion and contestation over democracy’s meaning. Re-examining democracy promotion at its time of crisis, this book will be of interest scholars and students of democracy and democratization, politics and international relations, international law, development studies and political theory.

This book explores the often assumed but so far not examined proposition that a particular U.S. culture influences U.S. foreign policy behavior or, more concretely, that widely shared basic assumptions embraced by members of the U.S. administration have a notable impact on foreign policy-making. Publicly professed beliefs regarding America’s role in the world and about democracy’s universal appeal – despite much contestation – go to the heart of U.S. national identity. Employing extensive foreign policy text analysis as well as using the case study of U.S.-Egyptian bilateral relations during the Clinton, Bush junior, and Obama administrations, it shows that basic assumptions matter in U.S. democracy promotion in general, and the book operationalizes them in detail as well as employs qualitative content analysis to assess their validity and variation. The research presented lies at the intersection of International Relations, U.S. foreign policy, regional studies, and democracy promotion. The specific focus on the domestic ‘cultural’ angle for the study of foreign policy and this dimension’s operationalization makes it a creative crossover study and a unique contribution to these overlapping fields.

With contributions from experts on democracy promotion, this volume examines civil society development and external civil society promotion in post-socialist Europe. It focuses on countries with a failed or deficient process of democratic consolidation looking at unintended consequences of external democracy promotion on civil society development.

This critical introduction to democracy promotion seeks to provide students with an understanding of some of the key dynamics and contentions revolving around this controversial policy agenda. Specifically, this textbook examines democracy promotion through seeking to answer, from the perspective of an approach informed by ‘critical theory’, a set of important questions often posed to democracy promoters, such as: Who is involved in democracy promotion today and what kinds of power relations are embedded in it? Is democracy promotion driven by the values or interests of key actors? Is democracy promotion regime-change by another name? Is democracy promotion ‘context-sensitive’ or an imposition of Western powers? Is democracy promotion about achieving liberal economic reform in target states? Is democracy promotion a tool of the powerful, a form of hegemonic control of target populations? The book suggests a set of provocative answers to these questions and also puts forward a set of challenges for democracy promoters and supporters to take on today. Democracy Promotion serves as an effective introduction to an increasingly topical policy agenda for students and general readers and, at the same time, seeks to advance an important set of new critical perspectives for practitioners and policy-makers of democracy promotion to consider.

A detailed examination of the role of US and European 'democracy promoters' in Jordan based on a diverse range of original source material.

This book traces and conceptualises the changing notion of democracy and demonstrates how democracy promotion finds itself at the heart of contemporary international discourses and policies. Democracy promotion is widely considered to constitute a hypocritical and failed ‘grand international narrative’ of the 1990s and has allegedly been replaced by other, more pressing and academically more captivating concerns, such as conflict management, statebuilding and climate change. This book challenges this position and argues that the core notions of democracy promotion, such as empowerment, inclusion and responsiveness, are a key concern of contemporary international policymakers. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt as well as John Dewey, it investigates the notion of democracy and modality of its promotions through the policy fields of conflict management, statebuilding and climate change. The central development, the book observes, is the reconceptualisation of democracy from the constituted sphere of the public to the lived relations of the social. The book argues that the novel rationality of democracy and its promotion offers a particular solution to governing impasses in a world perceived to be globalised and complex, which accounts for democracy’s current but neglected centrality. This book will be of much interest to students of democracy, intervention, statebuilding, global governance and IR in general.

This book examines the substance of European Union (EU) democracy promotion by comparing it with norms of governance that other international actors promote, among them the United Nations, the United States, the Central and East European EU member states, Russia, China and non-governmental organizations. It aims is to gain a better understanding of the EU’s democracy promotion agenda and to learn more about the (in)distinctiveness of the norms diffused by the EU. Building on a common conceptual chapter, the contributions follow different theoretical approaches and research designs, and focus on a diversity of case studies. The book concludes that in comparison with other international actors, the EU’s conceptual approach to democracy promotion is diffuse, which in turn makes the EU a particularly flexible but also ‘technical’ democracy promoter when it comes to implementation. At the same time, there are limits to flexibility at the level of concepts and frames. This indicates a distinct character of the substance of EU democracy promotion, which can be linked to the nature of the EU polity. This book was published as a special issue of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

The role of democracy promotion in US foreign policy has increased considerably in the last three decades, booming especially in the immediate years after the end of the Cold War. The rise of democracy promotion originated in a long historical tradition that saw exporting American political values as instrumental in securing US security and economic interests, an idea which was expressed freely once Cold War strategic constraints disappeared. Under Bill Clinton, there was an explicit attempt to do so by reframing American strategy in terms of ‘democratic enlargement’ and this book assesses the strategic use of democracy promotion in US foreign policy and its different outcomes during his presidency. Offering a comprehensive, global review of American democracy engagement with different regions of the world and key countries during a whole presidency, this book assesses how far the US has benefited from democracy promotion. It evaluates the instrumental value of democracy promotion for America by seeing whether the Clinton administration’s efforts in this field, and their varying impacts to democratization abroad, were matched by progress in securing US strategic goals defined under enlargement, in particular reducing international conflicts and spreading economic liberalization around the world. The book explores how democracy became central to US post-Cold War strategy, how the Clinton administration developed the concept of democratic enlargement and tried to implement it, and why it remained influential on foreign policy throughout Clinton’s presidency. With an analysis of the legacy of Clinton’s democracy promotion and its relevance to the subsequent policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, this book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in Foreign Policy, American History and Security Studies.