Conflicting Objectives in Democracy Promotion : Do All Good Things Go Together?

The agenda of external actors often includes a number of objectives that do not necessarily and automatically go together. Fostering security and stability in semi-authoritarian regimes collides with policies aimed at the support of processes of democratization prone to conflict and destabilization. Meanwhile, the promotion of national self-determination and political empowerment might lead to forms of democracy, partially incompatible with liberal understandings. These conflicting objectives are often problematized as challenges to the effectiveness of international democracy promotion.

This book presents systematic research about their emergence and effects. The contributing authors investigate (post-) conflict societies, developing countries, and authoritarian regimes in Southeast Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They identify the socio-economic and political conditions in the recipient country, the interaction between international and local actors, and the capacity of international and local actors as relevant for explaining the emergence of conflicting objectives. And they empirically show that faced with conflicting objectives donors either use a ‘wait and see’-approach (i.e. not to act to overcome such conflicts), they prioritize security, state-building and development over democracy, or they compromise democracy promotion with other goals. However, convincing strategies for dealing with such conflicts still need to be devised.

This book was published as a special issue of Democratization.

Julia Leininger is Senior Researcher at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) in Bonn. She has previously published a handbook on international organizations (‘Handbuch international Organisationen’ with Dr Katja Freistein) and developed an approach to study international democracy promotion.

Sonja Grimm is Senior Researcher and Lecturer on International and Comparative Politics at the University of Konstanz. She specializes in studies of transition to democracy in postconflict societies and has previously edited (with Prof. Dr Wolfgang Merkel) War and Democratization: Legality, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness, a Democratization special issue (2008, Vol. 15, No. 3).

Tina Freyburg is post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and Leverhulme Trust Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. Her current research projects explore new avenues in the study of the international dimension of democratization, in particular the democratizing potential of transgovernmental networks. For more information refer to [http://www.tina-freyburg.eu].