Democracy promotion, post-truth politics and the practices of political expertise

Abstract

Disinformation and other forms of post-truth politics are clearly a threat to global democracy. One way to better understand this post-truth moment is to re-examine the recent history of how political actors have tried to build or defend democratic institutions. This article turns to the field of international democracy promotion to examine the problem of legitimacy and trust in democratic institutions. While it has evolved from its late Cold War roots in pro-democracy propaganda campaigns, democracy promotion has increasingly become a field of expert knowledge aimed at professionalizing or improving the capacity of democratic institutions. This research follows the recent practice turn in IR theory to examine how expert knowledge is enacted through everyday organisational practices and argues that the recent rise of post-truth politics was not coincidental to the professionalisation of the field. Through interviews, ethnographic research, and document analysis of North American democracy promotion organisations, the following presents an analysis of contemporary democracy promotion as a set of practices emerging out of a global backlash against democracy that started in the early 2000s. The findings of this research suggest that performances of expertise in this field tend to be de-politicised, indeterminate, and narrowly focused on institutional legitimacy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These organisations also use the terms democracy assistance, or democracy support to describe their work.

2 In The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle outlined the differences between propositional knowledge (‘knowing that’) and practical knowledge (‘knowing how’) and began a conversation about expert knowledge that would be picked up in subsequent arguments about the importance of practical knowledge as a basis for expertise (see also Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986; Polanyi 1958; Schön 1983; Winch 2010).

3 Participants worked in autonomous democracy promotion organisations or governmental organisations with substantial democracy programs. Most were US organisations based in Washington DC, with a few select Canadian organisations that worked closely with their American counterparts (see Christensen 2017 for a detailed description of the study).

4 I assigned pseudonymous initials to all interview participants in the study.

5 This ‘commitment to values’ was explicitly opposed to the term ‘ideology’ as participants were careful to explain why their personal and organisational definitions of democracy were explicitly anti-ideological. In this sense, ideology was defined as a totalising and closed belief system, which ran counter to a form of practical knowledge about a country that could sort out which democratic principles might successfully take hold.

6 In fact, participants seemed comfortable commenting on ‘political’ issues in various countries but made clear that perception management was a practical requirement of operating in some places.

7 A similar phenomenon was identified by critical development scholars writing about ‘NGOization’ in the early 2000s. These scholars argued that Western interventions into civil society tended to focus on professionalisation while effectively depoliticising and marginalising pro-democracy grassroots movements (AbouAssi 2015; Jordan and van Tuijl 2006; Roy 2004). For these scholars, NGOs have long tried to avoid local ‘political’ entanglements by adopting what Choudry and Kapoor (2013) described as ‘notions of polite reformism and self-interest in the maintenance of their organisation and funding relationships’ (2015, 5).

8 Of course, this does not mean that the authority of expertise is the only form of exclusion possible. Structural forms of disenfranchisement and exclusion may also be expressed as frustrations about an elite/expert category.

9 Lysenko and Brooks (2018) outline the ways contemporary Russian information operations were initially developed with a focus on Ukrainian politics, specifically the Orange revolution and the role of Western democracy promoters.

10 Arendt (1981, 1980) argues that because politics involves competing interpretations of reality, political judgement is closer to aesthetic judgement than any sort of rational process. In this sense, ‘truth’ is not a necessary requirement for politics or political credibility.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Christensen

Michael Christensen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. He teaches and conducts research in the area of democracy and technology. His work in this field has appeared in journals such as International Political Sociology, the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, and the Journal of Classical Sociology. Email: [email protected]