Open Collections

Esposito, Karin

University of British Columbia

The concept of democracy is open-textured, in the sense it can accommodate varying normative and practical conceptualizations. Today, global visions of democracy are trending away from ideals of human rights, egalitarianism, and empowerment – the constituent features of what this project calls ‘quality democracy’. That shift reflects global democratic decline and rising authoritarianism, echoes of which, I argue, can be found in, among other places, discourses of international peacebuilding and governance transition. Democracy discourse in the peacebuilding context increasingly lacks substantive reference to or inclusion of ‘quality democracy indicators’ – metrics that are connected to human rights, egalitarianism and empowerment. The United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) is one of the primary international entities engaged in coordinating peacebuilding support efforts, and incorporating democratization norms and standards into states in transition. Through a case study of the democracy-related discourse of the PBC, focusing on post-conflict Sierra Leone, this project reveals and tracks shifts in the conceptualization, forms, and usage of the concept of democracy. These shifts manifest movement away from quality democracy towards more formal and weaker conceptions of governance and democracy. In contrast, it is argued, a human-rights and empowerment-based vision of democracy, conveyed through PBC messaging, reports, and documentation, could foster more robust quality democratization processes in post-conflict contexts. Thus, this research demonstrates the importance of critical analysis of discourse in International Organizations and the need to articulate quality democracy in discourse within current peacebuilding processes. The case study of the United Nations and PBC organizational discourse lends importance to examination of shifts in democracy discourse and the normative foundations of democracy support. The goal is to argue for the importance of moving the policy arena away from generic and empty conceptualizations of democracy towards a quality, human-rights and empowerment-based discourse and practice of democratization.

Text

2025-06-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88635

Law

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/