Is democracy promotion in other countries a form of promoting justice? Ever since the early 1990s, the practice of promoting democracy abroad has been advocated by its proponents as either instrumentally or intrinsically linked to promoting justice. Given that the forms of democracy that were promoted in the early 90s turned out to generate new injustices once transplanted into different contexts, the main challenge seems to be finding a model of democracy that promises to address injustices reliably across different contexts. On this view, democracy promotion will indeed promote justice if only the right form of democracy is promoted. However, this perspective neglects paying attention to the circumstances of democracy promotion itself. Drawing on a critical-republican account of justice as non-domination, I will first show that the current practice of democracy promotion constitutes a politics of domination – and thus an injustice – in and of itself. I will then discuss some institutional means of addressing this injustice and turning a politics of domination into a just form of democratic justice-promotion.
