{"title":"International Lawyers as Hope Mongers: How Did We Come to Believe That Democracy Was Here to Stay?","authors":"Işıl Aral","doi":"10.1163/15718050-bja10098","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"It is common these days to lament the recession of democracy around the world. The way scholars address the issue of democratic backsliding shows that there is a significant gap between the expectation about democracy’s anticipated course of development and the current state of affairs. This article argues that the expectation that democracy would consolidate over time was produced by the progress narrative of democratic governance discourses. Drawing on narratology, it conducts a discourse analysis to demonstrate that today’s dismay about the recession of democracy is due to an unwarranted expectation that was created by the progress narrative of democratic governance discourses. It focuses on the periodisation of history in the construction of these discourses and investigates how scholars used the Cold War – post-Cold War dichotomy to create a progress narrative.","PeriodicalId":43459,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15718050-bja10098","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"LAW","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
It is common these days to lament the recession of democracy around the world. The way scholars address the issue of democratic backsliding shows that there is a significant gap between the expectation about democracy’s anticipated course of development and the current state of affairs. This article argues that the expectation that democracy would consolidate over time was produced by the progress narrative of democratic governance discourses. Drawing on narratology, it conducts a discourse analysis to demonstrate that today’s dismay about the recession of democracy is due to an unwarranted expectation that was created by the progress narrative of democratic governance discourses. It focuses on the periodisation of history in the construction of these discourses and investigates how scholars used the Cold War – post-Cold War dichotomy to create a progress narrative.
期刊介绍:
The object of the Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d"histoire du droit international is to contribute to the effort to make intelligible the international legal past, however varied and eccentric it may be, to stimulate interest in the whys, the whats and wheres of international legal development, without projecting present relationships upon the past, and to promote the application of a sense of proportion to the study of current international legal problems. The aim of the Journal is to open fields of inquiry, to enable new questions to be asked, to be awake to and always aware of the plurality of human civilizations and cultures, past and present.