2 - Who’s Afraid of Politics?

Summary

The chapter demonstrates the primacy of ‘the procedural’ in overarching US and European policy documents, as well as in discourses of ‘democracy promoters’. It argues that the underlying structural power dynamics of Jordanian authoritarianism are fundamentally ignored, as the Jordanian regime is in important ways portrayed as a mere result of a lack of capacity among Jordanians at large and at times even as an agent of democratisation. Based on an in-depth analysis of a USAID-commissioned assessment of its Democracy and Governance portfolio in Jordan, and of a political party training event funded by USAID and implemented by the IRI, the chapter discusses different modes of institutional reproduction, as well as the self-perpetuating tendencies of ‘democracy promotion’ in the face of seeming practical failure. Ultimately, the chapter contends that external attempts at ‘democracy promotion’ only strengthen authoritarian stability in the country. Such interventions are thus shown to directly accept, depend on and reinforce the Jordanian regime’s questionable reform narrative, which problematises the imagined ‘Jordanian non-democratic other’ instead of authoritarian structures of power.