Scott Mainwaring is Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and the coeditor (with Tarek Masoud) of Democracy in Hard Places (2022).
Like many other world-government bodies, the International Monetary Fund is a necessarily nondemocratic organitzation that cannot help but have an impact on democracy’s prospects in poorer countries.
Future state-building missions must learn from the failure of past U.S. interventions: It is critical to work with local power-brokers rather than relying on a centralized state.
