An excellent up-to-date introduction to democracy promotion is long overdue. This books subtle, challenging yet forward-looking analysis offers much more. It should be read by anyone with an interest in the subject.
Peter Burnell,University of Warwick, UK.
Anyone who wishes to make sense of global politics in the twenty-first century will have to understand the meaning and dynamics of democracy promotion. Jeff Bridoux and Milja Kurki have provided a critical primer on this major new component ofWestern policy that will be of great interest to students, scholars and policymakers alike.
William I. Robinson, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA.
Asking hard questions and eschewing easy answers, this stimulating, insightful study takes the reader on an absorbing journey into the heart of the key debates and dilemmas defining democracy promotion today.
Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, USA.
Democracy Promotion
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.
Jeff Bridoux is Lecturer at the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University.
Milja Kurki is Professor at the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University.
Interventions
Edited by:
Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University
Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick
As Michel Foucault has famously stated, knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. In this spirit, the Edkins-Vaughan- Williams Interventions Series solicits cutting-edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post-disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IRs traditional geopolitical imaginary.
Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawaii at Mnoa, USA
The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics.
Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.
Critical Theorists and International Relations
Edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams
Ethics as Foreign Policy
Britain, the EU and the other
Dan Bulley
Universality, Ethics and International Relations
A grammatical reading
Vronique Pin-Fat
The Time of the City
Politics, philosophy and genre
Michael J. Shapiro
Governing Sustainable Development
Partnership, protest and power at the world summit
Carl Death
Insuring Security
Biopolitics, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Foucault and International Relations
New critical engagements
Edited by Nicholas J. Kiersey and Doug Stokes
International Relations and Non-Western Thought
Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity
Edited by Robbie Shilliam
Autobiographical International Relations
I, IR
Edited by Naeem Inayatullah
War and Rape
Law, memory and justice
Nicola Henry
Madness in International Relations
Psychology, security and the global governance of mental health
Alison Howell
Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt
Geographies of the nomos
Edited by Stephen Legg
Politics of Urbanism
Seeing like a city
Warren Magnusson
Beyond Biopolitics
Theory, violence and horror in world politics
Franois Debrix and Alexander D. Barder
The Politics of Speed
Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world
Simon Glezos
Politics and the Art of Commemoration
Memorials to struggle in Latin America and Spain
Katherine Hite
Indian Foreign Policy
The politics of postcolonial identity
Priya Chacko
Politics of the Event
Time, movement, becoming
Tom Lundborg
Theorising Post-Conflict Reconciliation
Agonism, restitution and repair
Edited by Alexander Keller Hirsch
Europes Encounter with Islam
The secular and the postsecular
Luca Mavelli
Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Deconstruction
Badredine Arfi
The New Violent Cartography
Geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn
Edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro
Insuring War
Sovereignty, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
International Relations, Meaning and Mimesis
Necati Polat
The Postcolonial Subject
Claiming politics/governing others in late modernity
Vivienne Jabri
Foucault and the Politics of Hearing
Lauri Siisiinen
Volunteer Tourism in the Global South
Giving back in neoliberal times
Wanda Vrasti
Cosmopolitan Government in Europe
Citizens and entrepreneurs in postnational politics
Owen Parker
Studies in the Trans-Disciplinary Method
After the aesthetic turn
Michael J. Shapiro
Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics
The scars of violence
Brent J. Steele
Celebrity Humanitarianism
The ideology of global charity
Ilan Kapoor
Deconstructing International Politics
Michael Dillon
The Politics of Exile
Elizabeth Dauphinee
Democratic Futures
Revisioning democracy promotion
Milja Kurki
Postcolonial Theory
A critical introduction
Edited by Sanjay Seth
More than Just War
Narratives of the just war and military life
Charles A. Jones
Deleuze & Fascism
Security: war: aesthetics