Education as a Legitimate and Effective Instrument of External Democracy Promotion

One of the main arguments of international democracy promotion is that democracy can contribute to peace. However, in the face of global trends of autocratization, as well as the consequences of the invasion of both Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq war in 2003, efforts of democracy promotion by external actors are increasingly questioned. Apart from the more evident failures, however, from a normative perspective, external democracy promotion can also be criticized for culturally imperialistic and paternalistic practices. This chapter therefore addresses the question of how external democracy promotion (EDP) can be both legitimate and effective. At the heart of this discussion is the hypothesis that education, if based on democratic principles of teaching and learning, holds great potential for promoting peaceful democratic transitions. The chapter is organized as follows: The introduction addresses the relationship between peace, democracy and democracy promotion. In the second section, in the absence of a comprehensive theory, I examine various conceptualizations of external democracy promotion with respect to how they contemplate the role of education. Thirdly, I discuss how education can address the need for context specificity in external democracy promotion. The chapter ends with a summary and discussion of the limitations of the hypothesis, from which I derive ideas for further research.