| In what follows, I will compare the democracy promotion strategies of Lithuania, the United States, and Sweden in Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. I will try to answer why these countries promote democracy in the way they do. My hypothesis is that the United States, Lithuania, and Sweden promote democracy in different ways, and that their different democracy promotion strategies arise from different concepts of democracy. I will end my thesis by considering what these different concepts of democracy might mean for democracy promotion more generally.;The data that I have used in researching this thesis comes from three primary sources: the Foreign Ministry of Lithuania, the United States' Department of State, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. I have looked at these three agencies' definitions of democracy and their descriptions of what they are promoting in Ukriane, Moldova, and Belarus. After describing their official democracy promotion strategies, I look at some of their specific projects and at the amounts of money that they have allocated for them in relation to other projects that they support under the umbrella of 'democracy promotion'. This has enabled me to better understand what these agencies mean when they say that they promote certain aspects of democracy, such as civil society or human rights or good governance, and to draw conclusions about both the emphasis that these countries place on these aspects and the concepts of democracy that underlie their democracy promotion efforts. |
