Making and breaking democracy
From Moscow, Bogota and Teheran to the Council of Europe
by Bonnard Pascal, Dakowska Dorota, Gobille Boris (dir.)
Summary
This book takes as its starting point a highly topical paradox: while authoritarian regimes are tending to harden and public freedoms are increasingly being called into question in liberal democracies, democratic formalism (electoral norms, expression of 'civil society', participatory mechanisms, etc.) continues to be widely used as a source of domestic and international legitimacy.
Based on surveys of practices in a wide range of countries (Algeria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Colombia, France, Iran, Poland, Russia, Turkey), the contributions gathered here show how the democratic norm, while remaining essential, is in many cases weakened or even emptied of its substance as it covers up more or less refined forms of surveillance and control.
This is the contemporary blurring of the line between authoritarianism and democracy, to which democracies and international organisations sometimes lend their support when they have to lower their standards.
Authors
Pascal Bonnard is a lecturer in political science at the Université Jean Monnet in Saint-Etienne.
Dorota Dakowska is Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Aix, Mesopolhis.
Boris Gobille is a lecturer in political science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon.
Other contributors include: Myriam Aït Aoudia, Maria Bigday, Vanessa Codaccioni, Françoise Daucé, Quentin Deforge, Clémentine Fauconnier, Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, Yauheni Kryzhanouski, Geneviève Lessard, Anaïs Marin, Elise Massicard, Sahar Aurore Saeidnia, Tatyana Shukan and Frédéric Zalewski.
Publication date
08/04/2021
Contents
Introduction - In the name of democracy. Transnational arenas, local couriers, authoritarian appropriation
Pascal Bonnard, Dorota Dakowska and Boris Gobille
Part 1. International organisations and the ambivalent promotion of democracy
Chapter 1 - The international manufacture of 'democracy' and 'authoritarianism': Azerbaijan and Belarus through the prism of the Council of Europe - Yauheni Kryzhanouski and Maria Bigday
Chapter 2 - Democratic parliament or recording chamber? Putting democratic norms on the agenda and challenging them in the transnational field of 'governance' policies - Quentin Deforge
Chapter 3 - (Re)questioning the role of human rights in democracy: the contribution of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to Colombian democracy - Geneviève Lessard
Chapter 4 - How Russia misuses international election observation. The strategic manipulation of a tool for the external legitimisation of authoritarian regimes in post-Soviet Eurasia - Anaïs Marin
Part 2. Democratic repertoires and authoritarian legitimisation
Chapter 5 - The circulation and appropriation of democratic practices in authoritarian situations: what role for experts in electoral strategy in Russia? - Clémentine Fauconnier
Chapter 6 - 'Civil society' in an authoritarian order: cross-sectional perspectives on associations in Russia and Turkey - Françoise Daucé, Gilles Favarel-Garrigues and Élise Massicard
Chapter 7 - Subverting and instrumentalising collective action. The Nachi and Young Guard youth organisations at the service of Russian power in the 2000s - Tatyana Shukan
Chapter 8 - The Tehran of the future will be participatory! Managing participation in an authoritarian context - Sahar Aurore Saeidnia
Part 3. Democratisation and democracies in the grey zone
Chapter 9 - Limited pluralism or militant democracy? Lessons from Algeria - Myriam Aït-Aoudia
Chapter 10 - The December 2016 parliamentary crisis in Poland. Political crises as an instituting process in authoritarian transformations - Frédéric Zalewski
Afterword - On attacks on the rule of law in 'consolidated' democracies - Interview with Vanessa Codaccioni
Reviews and speeches
International reviews2023, No. 98, Raphaëlle Parizet, p. 165-170.
"The diversity of the countries surveyed is matched by the diversity of the ways in which the 'pledges' of democratisation often mask violations of human, civil, political and social rights by regimes in a position of strength in their national territories and regional areas, unfavourable to the pursuit of diplomatic exchanges, and which allow themselves to flout the foundations of national sovereignty and the rights of peoples to self-determination.
Riadh Amine Ben Mami, 2022, " Uses of the democratic norm ", The life of ideas.
"How has a certain standard of liberal democracy become a reference point for most contemporary political regimes? Why is this standardised democratic norm sometimes appropriated by very authoritarian regimes? The enigma represented by the hegemony of the contemporary democratic norm is the main subject of study in the collective work edited by political scientists Pascal Bonnard, Dorota Dakowska and Boris Gobille, Making and breaking democracy. From Moscow, Bogota and Teheran to the Council of Europepublished in 2021.
"This book follows a vast literature in political science [...] documenting, since the 2000s, the various ways in which authoritarian regimes have used the practices of established democracies. But the originality of Making and breaking democracy is that it does not limit itself to a taxonomic or normative perspective. By taking a close look at the contemporary performance of democracy in different national contexts, on the part of various groups (both governmental and non-governmental), the book questions the way in which the 'democratic norm' is today an essential category of governmental legitimacy".