Democracy Promotion

The Routledge Handbook of Anti-Corruption Research and Practice takes a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach to provide a comprehensive exploration of the processes, conditions, and activities that hold the potential to control corruption. Building on existing knowledge gathered from a variety of social science sources, it strives to provide analytical emancipation of, and coherence to, anti-corruption studies. Anti-corruption transcends the traditional boundaries of state actors, involving individual and organizational business actors, civil society groups, members of the media, accounting, and legal professions, as well as sports associations and other non-traditional actors.

This book presents a comparative analysis of political governance and includes case studies from various African countries. It further sheds light on the paradox of poverty despite Africa's plentiful resources and traces its roots in historical legacies of colonialism and leadership failures. The book examines the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) initiated by the African Union (AU) in 2003 and explores the APRM's role in promoting sustainable development, political stability, and integration. Against this background, the book dissects the four thematic areas of the APRM, with a focal point on democratic and political governance, illuminating challenges and proposing solutions. In case studies on selected African countries, contributors present governance structures, highlighting the struggle for accountability, representation, and public participation. The book highlights alarming indicators of weak governance, including corruption and declining public engagement, and reflects Africa's journey toward effective governance. By doing so, the book scrutinizes African governing systems' responses to crises and offers valuable insights into the continent's quest for progress and transformation.

his edited volume adopts a sectoral approach to studying the European Union's governance in Central Asia - a region that is increasingly becoming the focus of major global political and economic actors because of structural geopolitical changes in the international community. Refraining from the application of such grand concepts as - among others - Normative Power Europe, the volume asks whether, when studying the EU's sectoral interaction with the Central Asian region as a whole, or its five constitutive republics, the European Union is capable of leaving its distinct mark on actors, institutions, policies, and norms. The volume is divided into three separate, yet mutually intertwined, parts. Part I, which sets the stage for the empirical contributions featured later in the volume, problematizes the conceptual understanding of Central Asia as a region rather than a sum of its five constituent republics and whether Central Asia can be treated as a homogeneous region to subsequently be on the receiving end of the EU's region-making and region-governing policies. Part II, the first of two empirical sections, turns to the EU's governance of security-related matters in Central Asia. Security here is understood broadly, ranging from energy security, to security of water supply, to more traditional concepts of national security. Part III is dedicated to chapters that assess the EU's impact on influencing and governing (the countries of) Central Asia in a number of policy areas, from good governance, to the rule of law, to education. By doing so, this volume offers the reader a theoretically and empirically rich analysis of the European Union's efforts to exert political, economic, and normative influence in Central Asia.

In recent decades, women's political empowerment has become a growing foreign policy and assistance priority. Every year, donor governments and multilateral organizations partner with hundreds of civil society groups to train women to run for office, support women legislators, campaign for gender quotas, and bolster women's networks in political parties and parliaments. The overarching aim is a simple one: to overcome women's persistent political exclusion in most parts of the world. What ideas about gender, power, and political change undergird these aid programs? What have practitioners and advocates learned about their strengths and weaknesses, and how have they adapted their approaches over time? And how might aid actors improve their work in this domain going forward? Drawing on extensive interviews with policymakers, practitioners, women's rights advocates, and politicians in Western donor countries and across Kenya, Morocco, Myanmar, and Nepal, Aiding Empowerment investigates how democracy aid actors seek to promote gender equality in politics. Saskia Brechenmacher and Katherine Mann argue that international aid for women's political empowerment has undergone a significant evolution over the last three decades, from initial efforts that aimed to integrate women into nascent democratic institutions to a focus on transforming the broader political ecosystem hindering women's equal political influence. However, this evolution is still unfolding, and changes in thinking have outstripped changes in actual aid practice. Overall, Brechenmacher and Mann explore the new challenges and recurring tensions that characterize the field, from the persistence of patriarchal gender norms and rising concerns about democratic erosion and backlash to aid modalities that are ill-suited to support grassroots feminist mobilization.

Entwicklungszusammenarbeit ist seit jeher ein umstrittenes Thema. Welche Ansätze funktionieren, wo liegen die Probleme und an welchen Stellen ist gar ein gänzliches Scheitern feststellbar? Die Fragen sind vielfältig, gesicherte Erkenntnisse gibt es wenige. Dieses Buch trifft ein differenziertes Urteil über die Wirksamkeit von Entwicklungszusammenarbeit. Die Analyse beruht auf der umfassenden Auswertung unabhängiger Evaluierungsberichte und mehreren hundert Interviews. Die Studie umfasst detaillierte Beispiele aus über 50 Geber- und Empfängerländern auf fünf Kontinenten, die einen Zeitraum von mehr als 20 Jahren abdecken. Dabei kommt den Initiativen Deutschlands und der EU besondere Aufmerksamkeit zu. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Untersuchung der Effektivität des Engagements im Bereich Good Governance, da es sich hierbei um den Dreh- und Angelpunkt globaler Entwicklungszusammenarbeit im 21. Jahrhundert handelt.

Uganda, Ethiopia and Rwanda have figured prominently in the post- Cold War relations between Western donors and Sub-Saharan Africa. Their 'new leaders' were embraced by Western countries as the antithesis of former Cold War-era African strongmen, and their countries became 'donor darlings', benefitting from regular and significant inflows of Western development assistance. To the dismay of African democracy activists and human rights defenders, such aid enabled the regimes in these countries to strengthen the repressive political and economic governance systems over which they preside. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, this book examines the role of Western development assistance in supporting these authoritarian African regimes. It connects changing Western donor policies and priorities to developments within the three African countries, to the past of these ruling parties as armed liberation movements, to wider regional and global political, economic and strategic shifts, and highlights the skillful management by Kampala, Addis Ababa and Kigali of Western aid and international aid architecture to ensure regime preservation.  

The Americanization of European Union Democracy Promotion: Ideology, Diversity, and United States Hegemonyis a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the origins, development and growing prominence of international democracy promotion in the past hundred years. Building upon the vast literature on the topic, chapters look at the EU as a global governance actor and map its multilevel governance system in democracy promotion, contextualising and comparing this with the United States hegemonic design, which has become a fundamental instrument of national foreign policy in the past two decades. Creating a comprehensive understanding of the similarities and differences between the EU and US approaches, José M. Magone examines various EU models of democracy, analysing how different national democracy understandings in Europe coexist with the technocratic liberal European one. The book ultimately argues that since 2004 the EU has aligned with a more aggressive ideological US hegemonic model of democracy promotion that has its roots in Wilsonian international liberalism. Considering the pivotal role of the United States' hegemonic design on EU democracy promotion, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of international relations, European and US politics, global governance and democratization. It will also prove vital for policymakers looking into the role the EU could play in strengthening non-national global governance in the long run.

What does compliance with judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) look like in states on the spectrum of democratisation? This work provides an in-depth investigation of three such states--Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia-- in the wider context of the growing 'implementation crisis' in Europe, and does so through a combined lens of theoretical insights and rich empirical data. The book offers a detailed analysis of the domestic contexts varying from democratising to increasingly authoritarian tendencies, which shape the states' compliance behaviour, and discusses why and how such states comply with human rights judgments. It puts particular focus on 'contested' compliance as a new form of compliance behaviour involving states' acting in 'bad faith' and argues for a revival of the concept of partial compliance. The wider impact that ECtHR judgments have in states on the spectrum of democratisation is also explored.

The European Union (EU) support for good governance reforms has been the cornerstone of its conditionality and funding policies and contributed its role as a transformative power. This book re-evaluates the EU's governance promotion capacity both within the EU and beyond its borders in light of the simultaneous decline in democracy in Europe in particular, and across the whole world in general. The book is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on the EU's good governance transfer to member and accession countries. Part II examines how and to what extent the EU's governance promotion strategies travel beyond its borders and focuses on neighbours, partners, and aid recipient countries especially in Africa. Part III turns to other regional and global actors and discusses the implications of illiberal contesters such as China and Russia on the future of EU's good governance promotion efforts. The findings of the book bring fresh insights for the scope and depth of the EU's governancetransfer capacity.    

This book contributes to the literature on the EU's role in the international system by engaging with the debates on global actorness and mapping new conceptual and theoretical avenues to better understand how agency and power are exerted at the global and regional levels, in a context of increased contestation of the international liberal order. Organised around three main lines, the book first looks at how the EU positions itself internationally in different policy areas, providing a multi-dimensional reading of EU policies, instruments, and practices; secondly, it engages with the EU's own perspective toward its regional contexts and with the perspectives of regional actors on the EU; and, thirdly, it explores non-European perspectives on EU actorness, as the way the EU is perceived by others in this system of contested leadership is central to how it is understood in terms of policies, instruments, and overall capability to lead and act as a global power.