The Impact of EU and US Democracy Promotion: One Step Forward, Two Steps Backwards?

Conference venue: London (United Kingdom)
Period: Oct. 22 - 23, 2011
Deadline for submitting abstracts: May 6, 2011

Democracy promotion has become the buzzword for policy makers and donors, and a separate area of research for academics. Recent events in the Arab world have put the issue of democratization back into the media headlines. Although democracy promotion initiatives stretch around the world many countries have fallen back into autocracy or have simply stagnated. While Western policies have increasingly become unpopular as a result of the usage of democracy as a banner for interventionist policies and the continued support for autocratic regimes that serve the interests of the West, democracy promotion is further challenged by the emerging economic and international importance of non-democratic states (China, Russia). In addition, the cry for democracy in Northern Africa seems to be home-grown, casting doubts about the value of external democracy promotion and raising questions on its impact.

Thus, instead of the traditionally used but elusive and normative concept of ‘effectiveness’, the panel chooses to focus on ‘impact’, meaning the actual legislative, behavioural, or even unintended changes in the target country. With their sizeable budgets for democracy assistance and a clear political agenda, the EU and the US stand out as the most visible Western actors in the congested field of democracy promotion.. Besides rare exceptions, they are often seen as two very different actors in democracy promotion, with the EU sticking to its ‘soft power’ approach, while the US is more prone to imposing harsh sanctions. Also in its democracy assistance the EU is perceived as more technocratic and less politically intrusive than the US. However, whether this difference in approach is related to a difference in impact has not been thoroughly investigated.

This panel welcomes contributions that assess the impact of EU and US democracy promotion activities. It especially invites papers that focus on target countries with a certain openness to democracy promotion, since the lack of democratic progress in these cases has the potential to reveal better the shortcomings of democracy promotion. The following aspects of European and American democracy promotion are of particular interest to this panel: 1) the focus of democracy promotion on specific areas such as elections, political parties and civil society, and the possible relationship between the area of democracy promotion and its impact; 2) the results of possible cooperation or lack thereof between the promoters in a particular geographic area or country; and 3) the specific impact of democracy promotion policies of the individual promoters. The panel encourages comparative research on the impact of the policies of both major democracy promoters as well as contributions that focus on the EU or US in particular.

Papers may be based on a general analysis of policies as well as on in-depth case studies.
 
Please send your abstracts (max 300 words) by 6 May, 2011 to nelli.babayan@sis.unitn.it

Nelli Babayan
School of International Studies
University of Trento
e-mail: nelli.babayan@sis.unitn.it