Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: The Micropolitics of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Bolivia

Abstract

In the wake of a massive 2003 uprising in El Alto, Bolivia, U.S. democracy assistance programs targeted the city, promising to address Alteños’ frustration with democratic institutions and to teach deliberative democratic skills. In this article I examine the position of civic education “replicators.” I use this term to describe people from the city of El Alto—many of them young adults—who were trained by U.S. democracy assistance programs to promote renewed and rehabilitated democratic practices among Alteños. I consider what the position of replicators reveals about the governance technologies, aid ideologies, and objectives of U.S. democracy‐promotion programs. I argue that despite these programs’ emphasis on producing subjects who are “governable,” replicators are engaged in complex negotiations regarding the form and content of democracy assistance programs, and many continue to enact political practices that donor representatives frequently characterize as outmoded, illiberal, and antidemocratic. Through the experiences of replicators, we learn that liberal democratic concepts, practices, and subjectivities are already mediated and refracted through lived histories and sociopolitical affiliations of the very people tasked with their duplication and spread. Attending to the microdynamics of replication exposes how that repetition itself helps create the conditions under which replicators come to question their endeavors and to articulate understandings of democracy that incorporate practices donors would likely reject. [democracy, foreign aid, political subjectivity, NGOs, Bolivia]