by Eva Johais
University of Michigan Press, 2027
Cloth: 978-0-472-07602-4
Paper: 978-0-472-05602-6
eISBN: 978-0-472-90336-8 (OA)
Electoral assistance is the prototypical tool to promote democracy and the related goals of peace and development. Rather than assessing whether this tool achieves its intentions, Practicing Electoral Assistance explains how international support for election processes has become normal practice. For this practice-theoretical approach to world politics, Eva Johais combines theories and methods from anthropology, international relations, political science, and sociology. Based on multisited ethnographic fieldwork, she presents detailed empirical knowledge of the relevant institutions, organizations, actors, and actions. Practicing Electoral Assistance takes readers to hotel rooftops, embassies, government buildings, and offices in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Conakry (Guinea), and to the United Nations headquarters in New York. Through this journey, readers come to understand that electoral assistance means different things: it is a mission for democracy promoters, an intervention tool for peacebuilders, a work for election experts, and a business line for managers of development organizations. While the practice is anchored in the aid system, it has gained independence from the system’s structural constraints through the professionalization of election administration and the establishment of the transnational election profession.
Eva Johais is Senior Researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway.
“I see Practicing Electoral Assistance as a pathbreaking book. I know of no other work that looks at the practice of electoral assistance in Africa with this level of both empirical and analytical sophistication. What is particularly important are the ways in which the author brings out the ambiguities that emerge in this kind of electoral assistance.”
— Mervyn Frost, King’s College LondonLabel: Knowledge Unlatched
License: CC BY-NC
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