Portfolio post 2

I met with Prof. Mislan on September 7 for about 30 minutes. After meeting each other personally, we discussed my academic history at AU, my future academic plans, and how they relate to my research project. The first specific item we talked about was Reinhold Niebuhr’s book The Irony of American History, which Prof. Mislan suggested I read over the summer. I shared my opinion that the book is principally an argument against ideology in foreign policymaking. Niebuhr, writing during the Cold War, contended that both the Soviet Union’s communist ideology and America’s liberal ideology could distort their respective foreign policies if emphasized over factual nuances. The largest concern I shared with Prof. Mislan was that my topic, as of yet, has not been focused into a single puzzle or question. Prof. Mislan told me that there will always be a worthy, manageable research question in a rich thematic area. Accordingly, my next few steps in the process should be focused on finding a puzzle that I can get my question out of. Along with the research related readings from class, I think the best way to go about that would be to read academic literature on democratization, including in the Journal of Democracy.

Research Portfolio Post #1: Research Interests

The topic that I will be researching this year is the various methods of US democracy promotion, a topic I’m interested in for two reasons.

First, the expanding or declining trends of democracy worldwide have been a key theme of world history for the past few decades. The fall of the Soviet Union brought about democratization in Europe that helped expand the project of European economic and political integration started after World War II. The Arab Spring and subsequent faltering of democratic movements in the Middle East created new layers of instability in that region. And politics today in countries from Turkey to Russia to the Philippines is largely defined by increasing strength of authoritarian actors. Almost all current international events can be seen in part through a lens of forward or backward moving democratization.

And secondly, democracy promotion is a feature of US foreign policy that is often known a mile wide and an inch deep. Anyone who follows foreign policy knows that it plays a prominent part at least in the rhetoric of American leaders, and it was perhaps the most prominent element of the foreign policies of Presidents Clinton and Bush 43. (Its relative absence with Obama and Trump is equally notable.) However, while the basic concept of democracy promotion is widely known, the various methods remain largely untouched in conversations about the topic. When they are discussed, discussions revolve around large scale military intervention, which is important but excludes a large part of the policy. Smaller military action, commercial tactics, and the use of aid and diplomacy receive practically no mention or evaluation. With this research, I hope to make the conversation about democracy promotion more holistic.

The “puzzle” I used when applying for the program was to determine the effectiveness of the various methods of democracy promotion. I thought that such a question was probably too broad at the time, and I now think that even more so. To further focus my work, I could evaluate individual tactics or compare the democratization in countries targeted by America versus other democratizing countries, etc. I am still largely unsure of a particular direction I want to take the project.