My project seeks to examine major theories of democracy as they are reflected in the strategies used by American democracy promotion institutions in Central Asia. Specifically, I will contrast the role of American programs in the relatively successful establishment of a multiparty democracy in Mongolia with their role in the relative failures in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Additionally, I will look at the consequences of Kyrgyzstan’s “Tulip Revolution” as a possible example of a new “fourth wave” of democratization for the twenty-first century.
The goal of my comparative work is to find the most successful American democratization practices and evaluate the feasibility of applying them elsewhere in Central Asia. First, in Tajikistan, I would like to look at how the National Democratic Institute’s effort to apply Rawlsian fairness to the electoral process and create from an ethnically and geographically divided people an “imagined community” has been stymied by external (primarily Russian) meddling and the pressures of realist power politics. Second, in Kyrgyzstan, I would like to investigate how media work by Internews and the International Committee for Journalists and the Institute on Democracy in Eastern Europe’s Civic Bridges program created what Robert Putnam calls “social capital”, which facilitated (though not, as ex-president Akayev claimed, caused) the March 2005 Tulip Revolution and will inevitably play a crucial role in determining the outcome of the June 26 presidential election. Finally, in Mongolia, I would like to research how community forum programs administered by the International Republican Institute and the Asia Foundation have created an “imagined community” and cultivated social capital, setting the stage for an extremely competitive 2004 parliamentary election and allowing the country to join longer-established democracies as candidates for the U.S.’s prestigious Millennium Challenge Account grant program. I would like to both investigate how the programs’ approaches (whether they brought a predefined concept to a country or let their experiences guide them) and their methods of evaluation, each reflections on the democracy theory that guides the organizations (and often, by extension, the American government itself).
In other words, I am interested in explaining how American institutions contributed to Mongolia’s success and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’s failure and speculating on how lessons learned from the former can be applied to the latter. Although most global organizations locate Mongolia in East or Northeast Asia (also called “Asia Pacific”) and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in Central Asia or Eurasia, such distinctions are more geographic than cultural and mask numerous commonalities, most notably common domination by the USSR and current competition between the United States, Russia and China for influence.
The summer will consist of extensive theoretical discussions with key program officers, observations of projects and interviews with and sociological surveys of local residents. I hope to gain a sense of not only the status of the programs but also of their impact: whether democratic ideals are being properly transmitted and recontextualized.
I hope to return from the summer with a fresh perspective on American democratization, derived from real experiences rather than Washington propaganda, that will allow me to analyze theories promulgated by both democratization literature, such as Samuel Huntington’s “third wave” thesis, and Putnam’s “social capital” theory, and by more popular works, such as Sharanksy’s The Case for Democracy, with compelling and newly critical insight and produce a work relevant both to political science and to current American foreign policy discussions.
The Central Asia Democracy Project is written by Alan Cordova.
