Confronting Authoritarianism vs. Disciplining Democracy: The Recent Protests in Jordan and US Attempts at Democracy Promotion

Jordan currently ranks among the highest recipients of US foreign aid worldwide, both in absolute terms and particularly so on a per capita basis. Besides military and economic support, Jordan has over the past years also been the target of a whole plethora of US democracy-promotion interventions. As a result, there are probably only a few Jordanian state institutions that have not in one way or another been the target of external attempts at some form of capacity building and institutional engineering. Those that have include ministries, courts, the parliament, the Independent Electoral Commission, and several political parties. Given the substantial amount of US funding for such projects, and recurrent claims that Jordan has supposedly been undergoing a process of gradual “political liberalization” since 1989, one cannot but wonder what exactly alleged US democracy promoters are actually doing when “promoting democracy” in the country.