Brad R. Roth

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Essay
23.1
Democratization’s Discontents: Rediscovering the Virtues of the Non-Intervention Norm
Brad R. Roth
Professor of Political Science & Law, Wayne State University. J.D., Harvard University, 1987; LL.M., Columbia University, 1992; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1996.

The use of international arrangements to “entrench” domestic political systems has been a quintessential post-Cold War-era project. Although this project had rather unsavory antecedents in the history of the international order—from the early nineteenth-century Congress of Vienna’s anti-republican alliance to the late twentieth-century machinations of the United States (U.S.) and the Soviet Union to maintain friendly governments in their respective spheres of influence—the 1990s version drew moral authority from the emergence of an ostensibly universal authoritative measure of governmental legitimacy.