Democracy Assistance

Civil society organizations are facing increasing political restrictions all over the world. Frequently , these restrictions apply to the foreign funding of NGOs and thus curtail the space for external civil society support, which, since the 1990s, has become a key element in international democracy and human rights promotion. This so-called 'closing space' phenomenon has received growing attention by civil society activists, policymakers and academics. Existing studies (and political responses), however, neglect the crucial normative dimension of the problem at hand: As we show, the political controversy over civil society support is characterized by norm contestation, and this contestation reveals competing perceptions of in/justice and touches upon core principles of contemporary world order. Taking this dimension into account is essential if we are to academically understand, and politically respond to, the 'closing space' challenge. It is also highly relevant with regard to current debates on how to conceptualize and construct order in a world that is plural in many regards and in which liberal norms are fundamentally contested. Empirically, the paper combines an assessment of the global debate about closing space in the UN Human Rights Council with an analysis of a specific controversy over the issue in US-Egyptian relations.

PRIF-Report No. 137 re-assesses current conflicts over international civil society support and calls for a global debate about the international norms that regulate external civil society support.
During the last ten years, a large number of states around the world have taken measures to restrict or openly resist the activities of foreign governments and non-state actors that support local civil society groups. Some governments have started to limit the amount of foreign funding a non-governmental organization is allowed to receive; others delegitimize, intimidate or openly harass groups that receive external support, or go after those foreign organizations implementing civil society aid. This phenomenon of increasing legal restrictions and political resistance on external civil society support has been dubbed “the closing space” and is part of a general trend in increasing challenges to, and open resistance against, the international promotion of democracy and human rights.
In recent years, the closing space has received increasing attention by civil society activists, policy-makers and academics, resulting in a series of studies that map the phenomenon, identifying its scope and depth as well as its characteristics and evolution over time. Yet, what existing accounts largely, or deliberately downplay, is the normative dimension of the problem at hand.
In PRIF-Report No. 137 “From Closing Space to Contested Spaces. Re-assessing Current Conflicts over International Civil Society Support”, Jonas Wolff and Annika Elena Poppe analyze the normative dimension of the phenomenon. In looking at the global debate in the UN Human Rights Council and at four cases (Ethiopia, India, Egypt, and Bolivia), they assess the normative claims brought forward in order to either justify or reject restrictions on external civil society support.
The authors show that governments in the Global South have good reasons to be concerned about the foreign funding of domestic civil society groups and argue that a promising response to the spread of closing spaces cannot but include a serious engagement with these concerns.

(FULL TEXT: https://rdcu.be/PqHA)

Civic education, i.e. activities aimed to teach citizens of recipient countries basic values, knowledge, and skills relating to democracy, has become a popular form of promoting democracy by NGOs from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. This paper examines whether democracy promotion programmes, such as civic education, implemented by NGOs from Central and Eastern European countries towards young people in former post-communist countries affect participants’ civic engagement and political participation. We test the impact of one of the civic education programmes on young people from Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation. The analysis of the programme and the results of the survey conducted among the civic education programme’s former participants from 2004 to 2014 contribute to a better understanding how youth participation can be built through mechanism of knowledge created by outside actors. The paper reveals some potential of programmes focused on educating young people in diffusing democratic ideas and behaviour in the region; however, it also shows the limitations of methodology used to evaluate the impact of democracy promotion efforts.

The existing research on international democracy promotion is characterised by a peculiar tension. On the one hand, many scholars agree that, since 1990, democracy promotion has indeed become a significant aim guiding the foreign and development policies of North-Western democracies. On the other hand, there is a far-reaching consensus that this normative goal is regularly ignored once it collides with economic and/or security interests. This article challenges the notion that we can understand the motives and drivers behind democracy promotion by assuming that interests and norms represent two neatly separated and clearly ranked types of factors. It argues that democracy promotion policies are the result of a complex interaction of interests and norms. After first developing this argument theoretically, the article presents results from a comparative research project on the US and German democracy promotion that support this claim.