Foreign aid for promoting democracy in the Arab world

Western and international democratization projects in the Arab world, as elsewhere, have been controversial mainly because, unlike traditional foreign aid through government-to-government channels that strengthened executive institutions, projects in the fields of elections, rule of law, and civil society are funded and executed principally through extra-governmental channels. While foreign democracy brokers successfully cultivated relationships with some liberal think-tanks and other institutions during the 1990s, there was also a political backlash as Arab governments attempted to restore their monopolies overforeign funding and the production of political information. L the last decade of the twentieth century.