4 - The Jordanian Civil Society Market

Summary

The chapter argues that the main character in US and European ‘democracy promotion’ in Jordan is neither Jordan nor democracy, nor an imagined Jordanian democracy, but instead desired self-understandings among ‘democracy promoters’ as ‘modern’, ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’, which are juxtaposed in opposition to the imagined ‘Jordanian non-democratic other’. Through the examples of external civil society support and youth education initiatives, the chapter demonstrates that the continuous functioning of civil society support (understood as its perpetuation rather than the achievement of its desired objectives) depends on a disregard for the specific context in which it operates and the associated ability to maintain the dominance of an often idealised narrative of supposedly universally valid processes of democratisation over everything considered Jordanian. In contrast to what a common understanding of ‘democracy promotion’ would suggest, it is therefore not the overcoming of differences that is central to its functioning, but largely the exact opposite: that is, their maintenance. In particular, the chapter looks at a USAID-funded and NDI-implemented youth education and participation programme, which the NDI itself considers to be one of its largest and most successful programmes in the region.