Rethinking Democracy Promotion in International Relations

Autorentext

Jessica Schmidt has completed a postdoc fellowship at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Duisburg, Germany and holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Westminster, London.

Klappentext

This book demonstrates that democracy promotion, having undergone a radical reworking, is now at the heart of contemporary international discourses and policies.

Zusammenfassung

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considered to constitute a hypocritical and failed 'grand international narrative' of the 1990s and has allegedly been replaced by other, more pressing and academically more captivating concerns, such as conflict management, statebuilding and climate change.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.

Inhalt

Introduction: The Survival of Democracy Promotion 1. Ontologies of Power, Pragmatist Democracy and Complexity Thinking 2. Artifice and Democracy Promotion: From Institution-Building to Civil Society Support 3. The Hollowness of Liberal Artifice: Conflict Management and Democratic Empowerment 4. Reform Thyself: Statebuilding as Environment for Responsive Self-Transformation 5. Tearing Down the Walls: Climate Change, Resistance and the Democratic Government of the Network Conclusion: The Promise of Democracy in a Complex World