Democracy Assistance

India, despite being one of the largest democracies of the world, does not officially have promotion of democracy as its foreign policy. The initial ambivalence attributed to India’s policy of non-alignment emphasising on territorial sovereignty and non-interference, alongside domestic concerns in a newly-independent nation, has undergone change in the post-Cold War period. Though India does not officially endorse the infamous idea of ‘democracy promotion’ involving regime change by external powers, India provides democracy assistance to states for building resilient democracies. This paper shall probe into the role of democracy promotion in Indian foreign policy by briefly looking into different connotations of democracy promotion as an instrument of foreign policy followed by India’s
changing stance from ambivalence to democracy assistance during and after the post-Cold War period. The final section of the paper shall explore the possibility of democracy assistance as the means to enhance India’s position as a global power.

The relationship between democracy and Islam is very complex, hence requires a rigorous scholarship to understand this complex interplay. The present paper examines the “success” as well as impediments in democratic consolidation in a Muslim majority state, Bangladesh. Through assessing electoral competitiveness, constitutional guarantees and implementation, women’s rights and political participation, and victory of secular party over Islamist, this paper considers Bangladesh as a “successful” Muslim democracy. Islam, this paper argues, is not a problem in democratization while there are a number of factors obstructing democratization in the Muslim majority states. To analyse the nexus between Islam and democracy, it is imperative to pay meticulous attention to explain the nature of the state and its social formation, origin, nature and practices of Islam in a particular society rather than just labelling Islam as incompatible with democracy. In the Muslim majority state like Bangla...

USAID democracy promotion programs might not only influence the democracy levels, but also increase the likelihood of revolutionary uprisings in the recipient states. Democracy promotion can strengthen political opponents of the incumbent regime via support for alternative media, civil society groups and political parties, on one hand, and, on the other, support democratic institutions that in contrast to autocracies are more tolerable towards political opponents and thus allow more room for expressing political will on the streets. Since democracy aid targets "democrats" who are less prone to exert armed violence, the authors expect it to be associated with unarmed uprisings. Using logit regression models, they find that the volume of the USAID financial democracy assistance appears to be a significant predictor of unarmed revolutionary destabilization, but its effect is relatively weak. Some particular sub-sectors of democracy assistance have an impact on revolutionary destabilization, namely: civil society, elections, human rights and media assistance. These correlations might be partly explained by the fact that USAID assistance goes disproportionately to anocracies. This aid tends to increase the probability of revolutionary destabilization in two ways-directly (through strengthening political opponents of the regime) and indirectly (through increasing the number of anocracies in the world).

MPIfG Working Papers present ideas that could guide future scholarly research. They may also draw out the implications of available knowledge for a better understanding of public-policy issues. MPIfG Working Papers are refereed scholarly papers.

The purpose of this review is to assess assistance provided under the three agreements and provide USAID/Iraq with an analysis of achievements, challenges and opportunities for future political development assistance to Iraq. After an initial ten days in Washington to review documents, and to interview staff in the headquarters of NDI, IRI, IFES and USAID, as well as other experts who had worked in Iraq, a two person team deployed to Baghdad on October 21. The team spent the next 25 days meeting and interviewing a wide array of participants active in Iraqi political processes. These included the three principal NGOs implementing the project, sub grantees and many of their local partners. Team members interviewed members of parliament, the legislative and executive staff members, members of the Constitutional Committee and representatives of bilateral and multinational donors. Security constraints limited most of the field work to the International Zone. The team trained six Iraqi Field Monitors. These monitors collected election and political process information in 13 strategic cities throughout the country.

The objective of this thesis is to find out whether the US is also genuinely committed to promote democracy in those countries on which the US has oil dependency or does the US energy security interest eclipse its foreign policy principle of democracy promotion abroad after 9/11. The hypothesis of this research is that the US is less interested in promoting democracy in those countries on which the US has higher oil-dependency. Materialist theory of democracy promotion is used to drive this hypothesis. Two statistical methods are employed, i.e. (1) hypothesis testing by using t-test and (2) regression, to estimate the variation of the USAID democracy assistance in those countries on which the US has higher oil dependency compared with those countries on which the US has less or no oil dependency. The findings of this thesis show that the USAID spends, on average, less funding for democracy-related programmes in those countries on which the US has higher oil-dependency and vice versa. These results indicate that, although the US prioritized its democracy promotion after 9/11 in order to tackle the problem of iv terrorism, the US energy security remains the prime concern for which the US compromises on its foreign policy principle of democracy promotion abroad.

This paper aims to investigate and analyze the democracy promotion carried out by Konrad-Adanauer Stiftung (KAS) in Indonesia. Our provisional findings on the case show that the hegemony of the North over the South is also perpetuated through political and economic assistance. Through the German political foundation of KAS, Germany seeks to foster a Western "better democracy" in Indonesia through several programs in collaboration with local actors. These "Freedom Agenda '' include training for civil apparatus and legal drafting training for national legislation. The Freedom Agenda carried out by KAS in Indonesia is associated with Germany's pursuit of democracy promotion policy. This study utilizes Neo-Gramscian Approach by Coxian Critical Theory (CCT) to investigate the role of KAS in maintaining the hegemonic order of Western Democracy in Indonesia through Cox's historical structure. By using library research, this study seeks to explain the reciproc...

Official Development Assistance (ODA) has become a way that states exert their influence over the other states. However, the concept of the ODA has been a point of debate, particularly in relation with democracy promotion and sovereignty. This paper tries to clarify each concept and explain their relations with each other.

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 socalled '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.

In the global "North-West", liberal democracy is regarded as the universally valid model of political rule that is to be promoted globally via foreign and development policies. Democracy promotion, however, is frequently challenged by justice-related claims. Whereas external democracy promoters refer to democracy's universal value, those resisting democracy promotion point to the collective entitlement to a self-determined political evolution. "North-Western" governments see liberal democracy as the only embodiment of a just political order, but in those countries that are the targets of democracy promotion different understandings of appropriate norms and institutions may exist. And even if democracy is generally regarded as the best formula to construct a just polity, democratization at times is perceived as threatening intra-state peace, an equally valued goal. Contestation about democracy promotion has, therefore, a crucial normative dimension that can be conceptualized as a series of conflicts over justice. If we conceive of external democracy promotion as a process of interaction-instead of unidirectional export or socialization-, such justice conflicts constitute a major normative challenge to democracy promoters. The paper presents an alternative perspective on "democracy promotion as interaction" and develops a typology of justice conflicts that captures the normative challenges brought about by the interactive nature of democracy promotion. It concludes by outlining first sketches of a research agenda on justice conflicts in democracy promotion.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) provides a procedural framework to victims, which grants them participation rights and assigns them a position as legal subjects. The status of victims at the ICC is not automatically inherent to international criminal law, but rather the preliminary result of a legal development and a process of political negotiation. In this paper, the development of victimhood is traced along the stages of international criminal law and its institutions leading to the implementation of the ICC. In addition, the paper detaches the concept of victimhood from a purely jurisprudential framework and transfers it to the concept of transitional justice. In doing so, it demonstrates that the victim-specific norms in the Rome Statute have the potential for a restorative function.

This essay deals with democracy promotion & protection by established democracies. It first describes how the dynamics and understanding of regime transitions changed from the first to the present fourth wave of democratization. Subsequently, it defines democracy promotion & protection and describes the different components of it. Finally, it discusses the issue of the strategies of the democracy promoters & protectors and takes a critical look at the issue of evaluating of their activities. This essay claims, among other things, that: (1) In general, the goals of the democracy promoters & protectors are focused on outcomes and less on democracy as an open ended process or procedure of government; (2) There is no apolitical way to democratize and, therefore, there is no apolitical strategy to promote & protect democracy; (3) Democracy promotion differs significantly from democracy protection, but donors are rarely aware of it; (4) For impact evaluation of democracy promotion & protection to make sense, three different levels of impact should be distinguished: the micro, meso, and macro.

This paper aims to investigate and analyze the democracy promotion carried out by Konrad-Adanauer Stiftung (KAS) in Indonesia. Our findings on the case show that the hegemony of  the North over the South is also perpetuated through political and economic assistance. Through the German political foundation of  KAS, Germany seeks to foster a Western “better democracy” in Indonesia through several programs in collaboration with local actors. These “Freedom Agenda ‘’ include training for civil apparatus and legal drafting training for national legislation. The Freedom Agenda carried out by KAS in Indonesia is associated with Germany’s pursuit of  democracy promotion policy. This study utilizes Neo-Gramscian Approach by Coxian Critical Theory (CCT) to investigate the role of  KAS in maintaining the hegemonic order of  Western Democracy in Indonesia through Cox’s historical structure. By using library research, this study seeks to explain the reciprocal relationship between Cox’s social forces in hegemony structure of  Western democracy.

Keywords: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung; democracy promotion; hegemony; social forces

This article argues that, since the end of the Cold War, the understanding of democratic norm promotion has shifted through three conceptually distinct and chronologically distinguishable stages: the early 1990s view that democratic norms would be universalized with the Cold War victory of liberal ideals and the spread of new global norms of good governance; the mid-to late-1990s view that barriers to the promotion of democratic norms could be understood as the product of state or elite self-interests; and the perspective dominant since the 2000s, that the promotion of democratic norms necessarily involves much deeper and more extensive external intervention in order to transform social institutions and societal practices. Through charting the shifts in the understanding of democratic norm promotion, this article seeks to highlight the problems inherent in norm promotion discourses that emphasize the importance of subjective agency, normative choices, and cultural and ideational frameworks of understanding. A key problem being that, in the downplaying of social and economic context, agency-based understandings tend to degrade the rational capacities of-and to exoticize and problematize-the non-Western subject. The social constructivist approach, which presupposes a closed or endogenous framework of societal reproduction, has thereby been a crucial paradigm through which Western democracy promotion discourses have shifted to emphasizing the subjective policy barrier posed by the allegedly 'nonliberal' mindset of the non-Western subject.

Since Mubarak was brought down by the 25 January "revolution" on 11th February 2011, the name of the new president has captured the attention of all Egyptians over the past 18 months. Throughout 3 decades of Mubarak's rule, and 6 decades since the establishment of the republican regime, the president was always a key, if not the only player in Egyptian politics. On 23 and 24 of May 2012, Egyptians went out for the first time in their history to choose their ruler in Egypt's first free and fair elections. While 13 candidates from different political backgrounds competed for the post in the first round, the results brought Mohammad Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim brotherhood, and Ahmad Shafik, the former prime minster of Mubarak, to the runoff. Despite the fierce competition between the two candidates, and the attempt to frame it within the struggle between the 25 January "revolution" and the old regime, this paper argues that both candidates represent a reproduction of the dualism of the 1952 regime: a military figure in civilian clothes versus the Muslim brotherhood, and it shows that the 25 January "revolution" has failed to change the old rules of the game. In this paper, I will analyze the presidential elections, the reproduction of the 1952 regime dualism, and its impact on Egypt's transition from authoritarianism.

Women Development and Resource Centre (KWDRC), as well as Mr. Ifeanyi Ajaegbo, of Youth Now, the Project Manager, for meeting with the National Consultant, answering questions posed by the International Consultant, providing documents and making arrangements for the field visits by the National Consultant. Thanks are also due to all of those who met with the National Consultant in the course of the field mission. All of the photographs used in the report were provided by KWDRC.

Formalisierung und Genauigkeit in den Anfången der Populationsaekologie um 1900* Summary: In fisheries biology of the late 19th century, the challenges posed to taxonomy by Darwinian theory intersected with attempts to increase the productivity of marine populations. Addressing both discourses, the influential German zoologist Friedrich Heincke developed a set of methods to determine exactly the differences between varieties or races of herring. In taxonomy, his methods contributed to the development of a biological species concept; in fisheries biology, they allowed tracing the herrings' migrations, which ultimately aided in divising schemes for sustainable fisheries. Heincke's use of mathematical statistics, some of them borrowed from anthropometry, served to distinguish his ,exact`approach from that of typological taxonomists. Beyond its use as a rhetorical ploy, exactness gained meaning in the epistemic regime of exact reproduction of measurements, which entailed the replication of measurement techniques for the purpose of comparison e.g. of herrings caught at different locations. This exactness was enabled by the formalisation of the process of taxonomic identification.

... Vor diesem Hintergrund, schreibt Richard Dowden, ... Die Schätzungen der entführten Kinder belaufen sich auf 30.000 Fälle (HRW, 2003; Ojera Latigo, 2008, S. 94), sie werden meist aus ihren Dörfern entführt, trainiert und in aggressive und skrupello-se Kombattanten ...

The authors would like to thank the interviewees for generous granting of their time and their frankness, and Eric Kite and Patrick Meagher for their helpful comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and do not in any way reflect the opinions or ...

Considering recent cases of authoritarian consolidation all over the world, the international call for increased aid to support human rights’ defenders, to bypass authoritarian governments in the implementation of development projects, and to improve the working conditions of non-governmental organizations presumes that a strong “civil society” promotes development through democratization.
However, the effectiveness of the current design of civil society support pro- grams remains a highly controversial issue for academics and development practitioners, who have debated over it ever since NGOs first appeared as recipients of official aid.
The passage from a “transition paradigm” to the “civil society formula” is not only a change of scale. Social practices related to the diffusion of the rhetoric of civil society and the particular social background that Civil Society Organizations constitute ought to be analyzed as such: Who are their members? What are their motivations? What effects does the external intervention in closed regimes produce on the social field, on the repertories of collective action and on the expression of political dissent? Almost 10 years after the “end of the transition paradigm”, is the civil society approach now over?

§ 2 Was bedeutet der Begriff "Transition"? Unter einer Transition versteht man den Prozess eines Wechsels von einem Zustand in einen anderen. 1 In dem hier interessierenden Zusammenhang geht es um den grundlegenden politischen Wandel innerhalb eines Staats. 2 Rein begrifflich ist auch der Übergang von der Demokratie zur Diktatur, zum Beispiel von der Weimarer Republik zum NS-Staat, eine Transition. Bei Transitional Justice geht es freilich um das gegenteilige Szenario, nämlich um den Aufbau eines demokratischen Systems nach der Überwindung einer Diktatur. 3 Im Fokus von Transitional Justice sind deshalb beispielsweise auch nicht der Aufbau sozialistischer Systeme in der Machtsphäre der Sowjetunion in den Jahren nach dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs 4 oder die auf ökonomische Umverteilung zielenden Umwälzungen, die in afrikanischen Ländern nach der Befreiung von der Kolonialherrschaft stattfanden. 5 1. "Bottom-up"-Transition Das Szenario, das vielleicht als erstes mit dem Begriff der Transition assoziiert wird, ist das Aufbegehren oppositioneller Gruppen gegen ein repressives Regime mit dem Ziel, den Weg für die Errichtung einer freiheitlich-demokratischen Staatsordnung zu bereiten. 12 Man kann diese Transition als (im besten Fall friedliche) "Revolution", als "bottom-up Transition" oder als einen "oppositionsgesteuerten Regimewechsel" 13 bezeichnen. Beispiele sind etwa die Nelkenrevolution ("Revolução dos 12 Vgl. hierzu das bekannte "conceptual framework for liberation" von G. Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1993).

Different processes in creating policies of development can be observed, some of which need to be supported. One of the most important issues of new policies is empowering citizens provided by various methods. The research is based on literature studies that show how broad this subject is. Other methods include statistical analyses which made it possible to perceive a correlation between different factors and a benchmark based on the example of the deliberation process in a project prepared by NGOs and the municipality of Warsaw. The aim of the research was to describe the relations and connections between empowering citizens, the deliberation processes and building trust in the local authorities. An interesting outcome of the research was creating a recommendation for policy makers based on the observation that building a dialogue between local governance and citizens can be significant for future sustainable development.

Governance ist zu einem zentralen Thema sozialwissenschaftlicher Forschung geworden. Dabei besteht Übereinstimmung, dass politische Gemeinwesen bestimmte Leistungen in den Bereichen Herrschaft, Sicherheit und Wohlfahrt erbringen sollen. In den Debatten wird aber oft „effektive Gebietsherrschaft“ als Kernelement moderner Staatlichkeit stillschweigend vorausgesetzt, und die Forschung konzentriert sich auf die OECD-Welt. In globaler sowie historischer Perspektive sind autoritative Entscheidungskompetenz und Gewaltmonopol des Staates jedoch die Ausnahme, nicht die Regel. Ein Blick auf die Länder des Südens, „zerfallen(d)e Staaten“ in den Krisenregionen der Welt oder ehemalige Kolonien bestätigt dies. Hier wird politisch gesteuert, ohne dass die vielfältigen Verfahren demokratischer und rechtsstaatlich organisierter Wohlfahrtsstaaten verfügbar wären. Der SFB 700 fragt daher nach den Bedingungen von Governance in diesen Räumen begrenzter Staatlichkeit: Wie und unter welchen Bedingungen we...

Recent 'democratic revolutions' in Islamic countries call for a reconsideration of transitions to and from democracy. Transitions to democracy have often been considered the outcome of socioeconomic modernization and therefore slow and incremental processes. But as a recent study has made clear, in the last century, transitions to democracy have mainly occurred through rapid leaps rather than slow and incremental steps. Here, we therefore apply an innovation and systems perspective and consider transitions to democracy as processes of institutional, and therefore systemic, innovation adoption. We show that transitions to democracy starting before 1900 lasted for an average of 50 years and a median of 56 years, while transitions originating later took an average of 4.6 years and a median of 1.7 years. However, our results indicate that the survival time of democratic regimes is longer in cases where the transition periods have also been longer, suggesting that patience paid in previous democratizations. We identify a critical 'consolidation-preparing' transition period of 12 years. Our results also show that in cases where the transitions have not been made directly from autocracy to democracy, there are no main institutional paths towards democracy. Instead, democracy seems reachable from a variety of directions. This is in line with the analogy of diffusion of innovations at the nation systems level, for which assumptions are that potential adopter systems may vary in susceptibility over time. The adoption of the institutions of democracy therefore corresponds to the adoption of a new political communications standard for a nation, in this case the innovation of involving in principle all adult citizens on an equal basis.

Critics of US democracy-promotion strategies of the last 20 years ask: what kind of democracy is promoted by US public agencies and associated nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), how is it promoted, and for what purpose(s)? This paper draws on interviews with NGO, USAID, and UN representatives, gathered in Egypt in 2001, to describe the fate of Egyptian women's advocacy NGOs seeking to implement the pro-democracy platform of action of the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). It offers some support for critics' contentions both that external (here USAID) pro-democracy interventions may actually obstruct democratization, and that the instrumental nature of US democracy promotion may mean that such activities are quickly eliminated or downgraded when they conflict with more primary US policy goals.

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the invocation of the Basic Structure Doctrine in the jurisdictions of India, Colombia and Benin. The Colombian experience highlights that legislature being a constituted authority cannot replace or substitute the constitution with a new one. The experience of Benin is unique, as though there are implied limitations within the constitutional framework, the courts felt the need to expand the scope of the implied limitations. The Indian jurisprudence on the doctrine has expanded since its inception in the Kesavananda Bharati judgment to include not only constitutional amendments but also administrative actions and statutes. The author argues that the usage of the doctrine by courts is not to usurp the power of the executive or the legislature, rather acts as a check on the misuse. In light of the rise of populist figures throughout the world, the doctrine can be used as a check on their autocratic tendencies.

Over the past twenty years, the European Union has been increasingly active in promoting democracy, and consequently so has academic literature on EU democracy assistance, culminating in a vast and diverse collection of concepts, theories and empirical findings. However, despite decades of research and practice, there is yet much confusion about the actual substance of democracy being promoted. In other words, what does the EU promote? Following more recent academic research on the subject, this article provides a general academic overview in search of consensus on the substance of EU democracy assistance and how to understand it. After all, answering this question provides a benchmark against which the EU’s commitment can be assessed.

Grantees operating on an international scale report more areas of concern with closing civic than those operating on a national scale. • Grantees reported experiencing more constraints to their freedom of expression relative to other civic freedoms. • More than a quarter of respondents report an increase in the threat of de-registration in past 5 years. • Collaboration, advocacy, and partner capacity building are the most frequently cited measures taken in response to shrinking civic space. What Is Civic Space? Civic space is a nebulous term, perhaps unhelpfully so, but for our purposes, it refers to the ability of civic actors to organize, participate, and communicate freely to influence the political and social structures around them. Based on the CIVICUS Monitor approach, five key indicators of democratic civic space include: 1. Freedom of assembly: the right or ability of people to come together and collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend their ideas.

Drawing on material produced by a range of US organizations and agencies in the period 2000-2006, this paper examines the methodologies and contents of USAID-funded assessments and evaluations of civil society, and interventions in civil society. Treating these documents as examples of a particular genre of writing, I examine first the extent to which these assessments follow one or more templates or formulas, second whether the information that they contain can be harvested to generate strategic and transferable lessons learned, and third, the argument that the way evaluations are generated, which relies on specialized for-profit firms often working on recurring contracts, raises problems of conflict of interest that impede the production or circulation of knowledge. My conclusion is that despite being produced by able and committed authors, these evaluations are flawed by organizational interests and a lack of both resources and long-term perspectives which conspire to reduce their value and impact in the policy process. They remain, nonetheless, valuable sources on the enduring structural contradictions inherent in the laudable, but still not fully understood or explained, goal of democracy promotion. Assessors at Work: Kosovo 2004 On March 17, 2004, violent riots broke out across Kosovo, in which 19 people were killed and nine hundred injured. The riots were directed mostly against the province's Serbian minority, but escalated into protests by the Albanian majority against the unpopular United Nations administration, UNMIK. In a report published soon after the events, the respected thinktank the International Crisis Group, made the assessment that "Kosovar Albanian society is deeply troubled, lacking institutions, leadership and the culture to absorb shocks and contain its violent, criminal minority" (ICG 2004: i). Just two days before the riots, a two-person team had arrived from the United States to conduct an assessment of Kosovo's civil society sector. They were working for Management Systems International (MSI), under an Indefinite Quantity Contract (IQC) from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Their report, submitted on May 2, 2004, acknowledged that they were surprised by the riots, and also stressed the difficulties that they encountered as a result of the riots: they concluded nonetheless that Kosovar civil society, compared to others that team members had assessed, was "considerably more sophisticated than its counterparts" (Blair, Donaghey, and Velija 2004: iv). The report attached considerable blame to UNMIK for the problems of March, and highlighted in particular the importance of the general uncertainty over Kosovo's political future that UNMIK's presence perpetuated. This contrast between assessments of society as "deeply troubled" and civil society as "sophisticated" raises a number of questions. What is the truth-status of assessments and evaluations? What is their scholarly value? What is their impact in wider policy debates? And what else, in the final analysis, do they do? Some of these questions are common to social scientific scholarship more generally, especially in its diagnostic and predictive roles. But

It is important to differentiate between restrictions on domestic civil society organizations per se and restrictions on foreign funding. Academics and policy-makers should acknowledge that the issue of foreign funding is indeed a specific phenomenon that comes with particular problems. If the political aim is really to prevent or reverse the general closing of civil society spaces around the globe, politicians, civil society activists and engaged scholars are well advised to not weaken their calls by arguing that there was an equal right to domestic freedom of association and access to (whatever kind of) foreign funding. (2) It is likewise crucial to distinguish between different sources or funders. Whereas external civil society support can hardly ever be considered "innocent" or neutral, some donors are usually considered less problematic than others. NorthWestern states and the organizations dominated by them often arouse particular suspicion. Governments that genuinely aim at supporting civil society should, therefore, look for mechanisms of implementation that reduce their own political influence to a minimum. Such mechanisms could be global (such as UNDP or the UN Democracy Fund), might involve multilateral, regional organizations or could resort to state or non-state partners that are perceived as uninterested and non-partisan in a given context. (3) Differentiation and clarification is, finally, also needed when it comes to the aims and areas of foreign civil society support. Concerns over foreign funding mainly focus on what is perceived as "political activities". Given that these concerns over externally supported political activities are legitimate but that the problem is that these activities are frequently defined in deliberately broad and/or vague ways, international responses should aim at delimiting restrictions on a narrow set of politically sensitive issues that are as precisely defined as possible. In sum, a global debate is needed in order to discuss, revise and advance the international norms that regulate-enable and constrain-foreign civil society support. In order to facilitate such a debate, governments and non-state actors that want to increase the political space of civil society groups around the world should accept that countries do, and legitimately can, impose specific restrictions on foreign funding. Rather than arguing about the "if", international responses should rather focus on the "how" of such restrictions. The challenge is to identify and delimit the means by which states can-and actually do-regulate foreign funding in ways that allow for preventing the kind of political meddling from outside that they claim is the main aim of such restrictions without producing broader "collateral damage". References PRIF for comments and Jana Baldus and Emelie Lekebjer for research assistance. The financial support of the Leibniz Association is gratefully acknowledged.

This article makes the case for why we should turn to studying democracy promotion negotiation, outlines the research questions guiding this special issue, identifies overarching findings and summarizes the individual contributions. After outlining the rationale for more attention to the issue of negotiation, which we understand as a specific form of interaction between external and local actors in democracy promotion, we outline three basic assumptions informing our research: (1) Democracy promotion is an international practice that is necessarily accompanied by processes of negotiation. (2) These negotiation processes, in turn, have an impact upon the practice and outcome of democracy promotion. (3) For external democracy promotion to be mutually owned and effective, genuine negotiations between 'promoters' and 'local actors' are indispensable; the term 'genuine' here being understood as including a substantial exchange on diverging values and interests. The article, then, introduces the three research questions for this agenda, concerning the issues on the negotiation table, the parameters shaping negotiation processes, and the results of democracy promotion negotiation. We conclude by presenting an overview of the overarching findings of the special issue as well as with brief summaries of the individual contributions.

This article presents an analytical framework that guides the contributions to this special issue and, in general terms, aims at enabling a systematic investigation of processes of negotiation in the international promotion of democracy. It first briefly introduces the rationale for studying democracy promotion negotiation, offers a definition, and locates the general approach within the academic literature, bringing together different strands of research, namely studies of negotiation in international relations as well as research on democratization and democracy promotion. The larger part of the article then discusses key concepts, analytical distinctions and theoretical propositions along the lines of the three research questions that are identified in the introduction to this special issue. More specifically, the article (1) offers a typology that facilitates a systematic empirical analysis of the issues that are discussed in democracy promotion negotiations; (2) takes initial steps towards a causal theory of democracy promotion negotiation by identifying and discussing a set of parameters that can be expected to shape such negotiations; and (3) introduces key distinctions and dimensions that help guide empirical research on the output and outcome of negotiations in democracy promotion.

The nucleus of statehood is situated at the local level: in the village, the neighborhood, the city district. This is where a community, beyond the level of the family, first develops collective rules that are intended to ensure its continued existence. But usually this is not the only level of governance at play. Above it, there are supralocal formations of power, varying in scope from regional networks to empires, which supplement the local orders or compete with them. The premise of the research unit is that local forms of self-governance are especially heterogeneous and prominent, wherever supralocal statehood exists in the mode of weak permeation. The central question of our approach is how local forms of self-governance work in this context. We will examine the relations to the state level as well as to other local groups as they develop over time; the scope and spatial contingency of forms of self-governance; their legitimization and the interdependency with the organization ...