Transacting Transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the Former Yugoslavia

In Transacting Transition, scholars and practitioners with first-hand knowledge of foreign assistance programs, recount what happens when democracy goes local, and principles like transparency, gender equality, interethnic tolerance and cooperation, run up against particular realities-political agendas, self-interest and memories of conflict.

Focused on the former Yugoslavia, where the 1990s saw an unprecedented investment of time and energy by a host of international organizations in processes of reconstruction and democracy assistance, the contributors offer description and analysis of diagnostic cases of international intervention to explore how the mission and vision of "democracy promotion" is enacted on the ground. Their experiences reflect wider trends in the evolution of U.S. democracy assistance after the end of the Cold War, which has increasingly focused on locally-oriented development and civic action as a necessary component of democratic transition. In these cases, individuals from outside the region found themselves charged with advancing ambitious agendas of social and political change while dealing with the micropolitics of particular situations-where, for example, village solidarity is fractured by old rivalries, participation in decision-making is habitually restricted by gender or ethnicity, or where donors and implementers disagree on the best way forward.

The book includes an overall introduction and eight chapters focusing on case-studies from Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia. Each case is described by a participant and put in wider context by a short editorial introduction. The book is intended to be broadly accessible to readers and students interested in understanding what is entailed in making grand visions of democratization work.

Other Contributors: Jeff S. Merritt, Dennison Lane, Paul J. Nuti, Claire Sneed, Sally Broughton-Micova, Clemson Turregano, and Chip Gagnon.