Working Group
Democracy and Democracy Promotion
Contested Meanings, Alternative Possibilities:
An IDC Working Group Proposal
The basic mission of IDC is to promote research, graduate training, and practitioner dialogue and outreach on broad problems of democratization. Many of these problems are policy-oriented, and relate to different ways of understanding party development, electoral laws and institutions, legal frameworks, and economic arrangements. Related to these questions is an even broader question: what alternative meanings of “democracy,” “promoting democracy,” and “promoters of democracy” are contained in the discourse of “democracy promotion” that has become ascendant in the U.S. and in the “West” more generally, and what are the sources and ramifications of these meanings? Is the linkage of “democracy promotion” and “state-building” a necessary union or a marriage of convenience? What, in short, is the genealogy of “democracy promotion,” and what are is ramifications for contemporary politics?
There is no innocent or unproblematic way to enter this terrain. We propose to do so in two ways: (1) through general discussion of discourses of “democracy promotion,” and (2) through careful attention to the way these discourses have evolved in connection with the experience of post-Communist transition in Eastern Europe following the “revolutions of 1989.” We focus on this particular location for a number of reasons, including its discursive centrality to post-Cold War conceptions of democracy and Indiana University’s unique comparative advantages in this area. But equally important are our own particular interests in this area and in specific places within it (Tim Waters—the Balkans; Bob Ivie—Slovenia; Jeff Isaac, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic).
Our working group plans a number of activities for the 2008-09 academic year, including a high-level faculty research colloquium, a number of prominent outside speakers, and work on building a “distributed network” with our contacts in Eastern Europe. Toward this end, three faculty principals (Isaac, Ivie, and Waters) met in June 2008 at Central European University in Budapest and joined with a small group of CEU scholars to discuss common scholarly interests, and possible collaborations, on the themes of democratization and democracy promotion. Isaac participated in the inaugural conference of CEU’s new Center for the Study of the Imperfections of Democracy (DISC), and Ivie and Waters are participating in a follow-up conference in October 2008. As a result of these connections, IDC and DISC have decided to formally affiliate and pursue future collaborations.
The working group will eventually broaden its geographical scope to include other areas. But we believe the East European focus has advantages as a pilot project and a way of focusing our own attention.
- Jeff Isaac
- Bob Ivie
- Tim Waters
