Democratic Designs: International Intervention and Electoral Practices in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina

This work examines the world of humanitarian aid workers and the processes of democratization that they put into effect in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Democratic Designs
is an ethnography of the practices of international intervention and democracy building. Coles examines both the lives of internationals and the work they performed in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, in order to demonstrate how democracy - as a set of meanings and practices - is built through routine, instrumental, and procedural actors like audit reports, signatures, voter registers, and election supervisors. Over a period covering five election cycles, Coles had unique access to electoral forms and reforms as they were put into practice, and documents exactly how the privileged life of the international - above the state institutions they were building and far from the realities of normal life in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina - interacted with their democratic works.