Promoting democracy has grown from a small, little- known
activity to a high-profile endeavor. It now involves academia,
think tanks, and the popular media. The number of countries and
organizations, inter-governmental, non-governmental, as well as
governmental involved in supporting the spread of democracy is now
legion. Countries touched by these efforts include a majority of
all the world's states and some independent territories that are
not yet fully sovereign.
The definitional boundaries between promoting democracy and
international advocacy and defense of human rights and "good
governance" are not precise. Similarly, the concept of promoting
democracy itself is not uniformly accepted. It has become a slogan
that attracts both fervent support and grave condemnation. For
Burnell, promoting democracy refers to a wide range of non-coercive
attempts to spread democracy abroad for whatever reason. At its
heart, it is political intervention in the domestic affairs of
other countries that seeks to affect the distribution of power,
whether by patient and non-violent involvement or more urgent
action, democracy assistance projects form a core activity.
Burnell holds that participation in the democracy assistance
industry will continue to grow. However, the industry's progress up
until now has in part been contingent on the progress of
democratization itself. The slowdown that is currently happening in
the advance of freedom and democracy around the world, and the
strength shown by leading authoritarian or semi-authoritarian
regimes, must raise questions about the outlook for democracy
promotion. If democracy promotion and assistance are to be fit for
the future, then the need for a broadly based, appropriately
contextualized examination of the policy and the performance is
greater now than at any time in the past.
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