Describe emerging democracies from the 20th century to the present.

For how frequently the term is used, and for the consequence of that use, democracy’s meaning should be simply evident. Of course scholars can deconstruct any term and debate any operationalization, but democracy’s connotation is more than academic. Authorities of various sorts allocate resources depending on a nation’s association with it. Activists can sacrifice their lives to realize it.

The meaning of democracy is especially important for those who engage emerging democracies, including the newly endowed Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED). The center is dedicated to study, and through that scholarship enhance, capacities to assure and extend freedoms in emerging democracies, by which I understand societies whose authorities and publics have symbolically and institutionally broken with an authoritarian past and are crafting institutions, social relations, and cultural forms that extend rule of, by, and for the people. Isn’t that final clause enough to satisfy the quest for meaning?

The world’s conceptions of democracy itself, and its relationship to various freedoms and social and institutional capacities, are critical to thinking not only about how to study democracy, but also to consider how scholarship might inform its extension. In this article I reflect on some of the challenges of democracy’s definition and consider their implications for thinking about the public good of scholarship engaging emerging democracies.

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