Shaking off the neoliberal shackles: “democratic emergence” and the negotiation of democratic knowledge in the Middle East North Africa context

Abstract

There is a general assumption in democracy promotion that liberal democracy is the panacea that will solve all political and economic problems faced by developing countries. Using the concept of "good society" as analytical prism, the analysis shows that while there is a rhetorical agreement as to what the "good society" entails, democracy promotion practices fail to allow for recipients' inclusion in the negotiation and delivery of the "good society". Contrasting US and Tunisian discourses on the "good society", the article argues that democracy promotion practices are underpinned by neoliberal parameters borne out from a reliance on the transition paradigm, which in turn leave little room to democracy promotion recipients to formulate knowledge claims supporting the emergence of alternative conceptions of the "good society". In contrast, the article opens up a reflective pathway to a negotiated democratic knowledge, which would reside in a paradigmatic change that consists in the abandonment of the transition paradigm in favour of a "democratic emergence" paradigm.

The politics of public land dispossession in Egypt: 1975–2011 and beyond

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A Radical Democratic Lens to Rejuvenating European Union Democracy Support

“…While much of academic literature can be put into one of the two categories above, there has, however, been a third strand of literature that has sought to break free from predetermined structures of knowledge production while also seeking to maintain the legitimacy of the international community. Most relevantly, other than calls to "decenter" EU foreign policy (Lecocq and Keukeleire 2018), there have also been attempts to theorize how the international community can embrace the contested nature of democracy rather than to steer clear of it (Bridoux 2019;Kurki 2013). For example, Milja Kurki (2013: 257) has criticized democracy support actors for not considering alternative conceptions of democracy, thereby calling on these actors to embrace "clashing sets of values and contestation over democracy and democracy support."…”