Project Overview

  • A four-year-long collaborative research project examining the efficacy of democracy-promotion policies around the world.

Leader

  • Christoph Zürcher, Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa

Partner Institutions

  • Freie Universität Berlin
  • Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
  • FRIDE, Madrid

Project Details and Goals

  • This is a four-year project to assess the impact of international democracy promotion efforts around the world since the Second World War. The project aims at providing a comprehensive evaluation of the efficacy of available tools of democracy promotion. It also seeks to uncover what combination of domestic conditions and foreign “interventions” – be they technical assistance, financial aid, sanctions, or diplomacy – succeeds (or not) in establishing democratic governments. One specific part of the project investigates whether and how countries that were affected by large scale violence can emerge as stable and democratic polities and the extent to which external support contributes to this outcome.
  • The program includes both macro-level (country) and micro-level (specific mechanisms of intervention) studies. In addition to mapping the main donors and their strategies, the project is developing a dataset that includes disaggregated data focusing on aid for democracy promotion and good governance for a number of countries.
  • Project’s web page