Anthropology News • November 2005

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E N G A G I N G E T H N O G R A P H Y I N E V A L U A T I N G D E M O C R A C Y P R O M O T I O N

I N F O C U S

In the past two decades the business of developing democracy promotion strategies, evaluating current practices and monitoringtheir impact has grown exponentially. While universalist standards modeled after accounting and audit models have been devel-oped to track the presence or absence of formal components of Western democracy, ways of assessing the equally important,albeit more fluid and culturally-contingent, criteria associated with democratic processes and transitions, such as diplomacy, civicparticipation and social justice, are often ignored or not understood. Here and during the annual meeting anthropologists discusshow ethnography can contribute to understanding these dynamics.

a democratic citizenry cannot func-tion effectively.

Among contemporary anthropol-ogists who have taken up Nader’schallenge are Hugh Gusterson andCatherine Lutz: significantly bothconduct research in domains seem-ingly fenced off by issues of securityclearance and national security(Gusterson on nuclear research, Lutzon the US military-industrial com-plex) and yet have managed to navi-gate access to rich data, simultane-ously advocating the need for morepublic anthropology. Their work iscritical without being adversarial,collaborative without being co-opted, and smart without being inac-cessible, thereby dissolving some ofthe dichotomies anthropologistshave tended, in recent years, toenshrine. Similar qualities are exhib-ited in pioneering work on Westernaid to Eastern Europe by, among oth-ers, Janine Wedel and StevenSampson. In a recent article inInternational Studies Perspectives,Wedel sums up her methodology as“studying through … tracking policy

and lucky among us may continueto prosper for a while; but the over-all picture will be one of involution,diminishing returns and—ultimate-ly—darkness.

Studying Up (and Through)Back in 1972, Laura Nader alreadycalled into question the salience ofparticipant-observation, suggesting(after Sol Tax) that its fetishizationwas driving anthropologists to focuson small-scale societies, and thereforeblocking work on the most relevantproblems of the world. In “Up theAnthropologist,” published in DellHymes’ still-timely Rethinking Anthro-pology, she laid out the methodologi-cal challenge and moral imperative ofethnography in the US, showcasingthe work of students on such organi-zations as the Bay Area PollutionControl Agency and the CaliforniaInsurance Commission. Her centralpoint was political without being par-tisan: without such understanding ofhow complex society works, led byanthropologists as “citizen-scholars,”

Posner to close reading, and foundthem wanting. Geertz judged theauthors’ views “sociologically thinand lacking psychological depth,”and recommended to readers thevirtues of “monographic attention tocritical examples,” exemplified by aquartet of recent works by anthropol-ogists. Thirty-two years after trans-forming an Oxford philosopher’smusings on winks, blinks and twitch-es into a transdisciplinary epistemo-logical revolution, Clifford Geertz isstill stumping for thick description.

It is a long journey from sheep-stealing in early 20th-centuryMorocco (Geertz’s example) to radia-tion poisoning in post-SovietUkraine (Adriana Petryna) or defor-estation in Indonesia (Anna Tsing).All four authors Geertz cites havepulled off a remarkable achievement:they have successfully “scaled-up.”Drawing on a range of sources, andusing a creative mixture of writingstyles not only to tackle transnation-al, global issues in a manner that sat-isfies the master of ethnographicpointillism, but also to convincemajor university presses that closely-textured scholarship on human dis-asters, highlighting social and cultur-al contexts, demands publication.

An Opportunity and aChallenge

KEITH BROWN

BROWN U

R ight now, ethnogra-phers of democracy pro-motion are in demand.After 15 years investing

in democracy in Eastern Europe,Eurasia and the Balkans, and asinternational attention movestoward the Middle East, a range ofinterested US actors, including gov-ernment agencies, NGOs and pri-vate foundations, are seeking les-sons learned. Though still con-cerned primarily with cost-effec-tiveness, many insiders recognizethe shortcomings of audit-basedevaluations which fail to captureon-the-ground reality, and are will-ing and eager to listen to, and buildfuture policy around, new perspec-tives. An active audience exists,therefore, for anthropologically-informed analysis of the complex,transnational domain of US demo-cracy promotion overseas.

This situation creates an opportu-nity—and perhaps even an obliga-tion—for anthropologists to dosome reflection of their own. Myown experience over the past fouryears leading a research project ondemocracy promotion in the for-mer Yugoslavia has brought meback to some of the core dilemmasgenerated in dealing with the chal-lenges of conducting fieldwork andcontributing to policymaking inthe contemporary world. Here Ioutline the enduring importance ofstudying thick and studying up, andconclude that to do both effectivelywe need to find ways to study with.

Studying Thick (and Deep)In his article “Very Bad News” in theMarch 24 issue of the New York Reviewof Books, Clifford Geertz subjectedrecent books on human catastropheby Jared Diamond and Richard

The Ethnography of Democracy Promotion

Participants (from left) Paul Stubbs (Croatia), Ana Mukoska (Macedonia), ReaMaglajlic (BiH), Radmila Dudic (Serbia) and Despoina Syrri (Greece) brainstormto identify key stakeholders and constituencies in international democracy pro-motion efforts in June 2005. Photo courtesy of Keith Brown

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Is Geertz suggesting these anthro-pologists represent a magic formu-la? I think not: I interpret hisreview’s title as indexing also thefact that Diamond, in particular,dramatically outsells all four authorshe cites. As the scope of the ques-tions under scrutiny widens, thickdescription not only gets harder todo, but also harder for audiences tofollow. If we confine ourselves tothe solo-authored, fieldwork-cen-tered mode of knowledge-produc-tion, we risk comparison with thosewho think the answer to the world’sdiminishing supply of oil and coal isto prospect wider, drill deeper andpump harder. The brilliant, intuitive

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Democracy Promotion and AnthropologyQ & A with Thomas Carothers

Thomas Carothers, senior associate and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the CarnegieEndowment for International Peace, is widely recognized as a leading international authority on democracy pro-motion, or the promoting of the development of democratic institutions transnationally through means of for-eign assistance. At this year’s AAA Annual Meeting, Carothers will headline a panel discussion, “Evaluating USDemocracy Promotion: A Case for Engaged Ethnography?” on Friday, December 2. This past September,Carothers spoke with AAA Director of External, International and Government Relations Paul Nuti about theintersection of anthropology and democracy promotion.

Paul Nuti: The existence or emergence of democratic political culture in transitional contexts lies at the heart of the discus-sion on evaluating the impact of democracy assistance strategies. What value would a capacity to measure political cultureadd to democracy promotion work?Thomas Carothers: The concept of political culture has long presented problems for democracy promoters. On the one hand, they knowthat political culture, however it might be defined, has an important bearing on their work. On the other hand, they find it hard to takeon board because it resists clear definition and is sometimes used as a way of arguing that certain societies are ill-suited for democracy,which goes against the universalistic impulses of most democracy promoters. I am wary of the idea of developing a method for measur-ing political culture beyond the sorts of attitudinal assessments that are currently employed. Aid practitioners are under such pressure tofind and use quantitative methods of measuring their work that they might well end up using such an instrument in mechanistic, unhelp-ful ways.PN: As a non-anthropologist democracy expert, do you have a general sense of how the discipline of anthropology mightinform the evaluation of democracy assistance?TC: Evaluations of democracy assistance too often are rather superficial exercises that attempt to measure quantifiable, short-term changesin specific institutions without adequately exploring a wider range of questions about the impact of the aid intervention. How was the aidintervention perceived and experienced locally? What were the indirect effects of the intervention on people and organizations beyond theimmediate target institution? What sorts of long-term changes were produced? Evaluators measuring for example how many public hear-ings a parliament held and how many people attended the hearings as a result of a program to increase parliamentary contact with citizensare likely not tackling a whole set of broader, deeper questions that are highly germane to understanding how the aid intervention affect-ed the society in question. With their commitment to in-depth, relational, long-term understanding of other societies, anthropologists couldadd highly valuable perspectives to evaluations of democracy aid.PN: In recent months, some in the social science community have noted that the current approach to democracy building in Iraqand Afghanistan would benefit from anthropological research of the local context. What do you think?TC: When democracy promoters try to help post-conflict societies rebuild their political systems, questions about who the main poweractors are, what their interests are, and how they are dealing with each other in the new environment are crucial. But assessing the ter-rain of power actors and relationships in a society coming out of years of fundamental conflict is a daunting task, as evidenced by the pro-found difficulties of the ongoing processes of political reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq. If anthropological research could help elu-cidate these power issues in ways that would be timely and accessible to the practitioners on the ground it would be welcome, thoughsome policymakers at higher levels remain resistant to what they perceive as overly pessimistic accounts by outside experts.

discourses, prescriptions and pro-grams and then linking them tothose affected by the policies.”

Studying WithWedel acknowledges that this is amessy business. With that judg-ment, I wholeheartedly agree—hav-ing been, to the audit-mindedobserver, messing around in myresearch into international democ-racy promotion in the former Yugo-slavia since the Dayton peace ac-cords of 1995. I set out with thegeneric idea of presenting to the“policy” audience my anthropolog-ical perspectives on politics, cultureand identity in the Balkans. I imag-ined myself, in heroic individualterms, championing the people ofthe region: I would confound theeasy certainties of journalists, diplo-mats and aid workers, and opentheir eyes to the reality that “anti-democratic” phenomena in the re-gion—slow progress, incompletetransition or nationalist resurgence—tell us more about Western world-views than Balkan backwardness.

In the course of study—in inter-views with international and localemployees of major NGOs, at work-shops on a variety of linked topics,and conversations with friends andcolleagues in the region—I discov-ered (of course) the limits of myown preconceptions—and my ownethnographic authority. Interna-tional organizations in the regionare often staffed by PhDs who knowfull well that a model of “ancienthatreds” has as much to do withserious analysis as “intelligentdesign.” Field officers can boast upto ten years of participant-observa-tion in the region, moving betweenassignments in Bosnia, Albania,Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia: theytake it as obvious to any but themost simple-minded that the “suc-cess stories” they generate are theproducts of particular relationshipswith funding organizations, notfaithful reflections of complex reali-ty. Local scholars see little purposein academic “West-bashing,” whichthey see as doing little except pro-viding some kind of credibility toall-too-real anti-democratic politicalforces in their countries.

What, then, to do, when the storyyou set out to tell enlightens none ofthose in it? My response is to seekcommon ground in the telling of thestory with a range of democracy pro-motion practitioners in the Balkans:professionals who worked for the

UN, Organization for Security andCooperation in Europe (OSCE) andvarious USAID subcontractors, aswell as program officers at the MottFoundation and the RockefellerBrothers Fund, who have funded ourproject. What I have encountered inmy interactions with these informedand committed professionals isshared interest in converting individ-ual experience into effective institu-tional learning, and frustration thatthe deadline-driven, grant-seekingworld of democracy promotionoffers no space for the analysis andreflection that would make that pos-sible. This is also the case for a gener-ation of talented, young, scholarly-minded professionals from theregion, many of whom are tired ofdoing what Paul Nuti has acutelycalled the “democracy dance” tosecure their livelihood, when theycould be conducting illuminating,critical “insider” research into theexperience of “being democratized.”

So now I am studying with. Inaddition to the anthropologistsalready mentioned, I seek to emu-late the work of Julia Paley, who

details how she shared ethnograph-ic methods with public healthactivists in Chile in MarketingDemocracy (2001), and Kay Warren’scurrent SSRC-supported project,examining Japanese foreign aid inclose dialogue with its planners andimplementers. Beyond disciplinaryboundaries, I also take inspirationfrom Watson Institute colleaguesJames Blight and janet lang, pio-neers of what they call “critical oralhistory.” As outlined briefly in thepreface to their book The Fog of War(2005)—itself a collaboration withRobert McNamara, a leading policy-maker during the Viet Nam war assecretary of defense between 1961and 1968, and Errol Morris, whodirected the 2003 documentary TheFog of War: Eleven Lessons from theLife of Robert S McNamara—this ap-proach seeks to capture and distilthe special knowledge of partici-pants in historical events by bring-ing together in dialogue scholars,decision-makers and documents,through painstakingly prepared andcarefully structured conferences.The triangulation of perspectives

yields, in Blight and lang’s view,new understandings of past mis-takes, often the product of faultyassumptions and a failure of empa-thy, with the promise of educatingfuture leaders.

In democracy promotion in theformer Yugoslavia, obviously, thepersonalities are less well-known,the events less fraught and distantin time, and the documentaryrecord less authoritative. It isrefreshing, though, to find oneselfscaling-down a methodology, ra-ther than scaling-up. Studying withmakes it feasible to study thick andstudy through. It provides not onlya concrete way to carry out the cen-tral ethnographic project of com-plex, nuanced story-telling, butalso, by bringing the stakeholdersin that story into the telling, toincrease the prospects of its beingheard and acted upon. �AN

Keith Brown is editor of the forthcomingTransacting Transition: The Micropoli-tics of Democracy Promotion in theFormer Yugoslavia. Further informationcan be found at www.watsoninstitute.org/muabet