This final chapter revisits the main findings of the book and ties them to the inquired legal events. The first part restates how property protection came to be prioritised over redistributional policies. The second part draws out the contradiction in the simultaneous proposition of a universal timeless legal order that at once claims to represent modernity. The chapter goes on to summarise how law emerges as a self-authorising practice through the lens of jurisdiction and temporal ordering. It concludes with a reflection of the relationship between the structures developed in this book and the two main pillars of legitimation for the contemporary regime of international investment law, namely the depoliticisation of conflicts and the promotion of development.

Chapter 10 largely debunks the impression that circumstances precluding wrongfulness possess particular practical relevance in investment disputes involving armed conflict. Especially in case written exceptions are not available or their invocation fails, states may seek to invoke the general rules of state responsibility to avoid liability. However, the chapter argues that force majeure – despite the impression one might have from its genealogy – has little to no room of practical application in the context of investment treaty obligations. Necessity, in turn, remains an available defence in principle, but its requirements are extremely restrictive and the chances for meeting them are slim. Countermeasures, the chapter finally argues, are widely unavailable due to the nature of investors’ rights granted by investment treaties. Infringements of their rights cannot be justified by way of a countermeasure taken against the investors’ home state. The law of state responsibility, hence, is not a viable ‘safety net’ for states seeking to avoid liability under investment treaties in the context of armed conflict.

This chapter expands on my dramaturgical theoretical framework by laying out the different credibility imperatives that are predicted to confront politicians and statisticians in government statistical systems. I suggest that politicians’ needs for data to support their policy agendas, the political imperative of creating an impression of government competence, and the pressure to depoliticise statistics are all likely to shape political decisions about delegating authority to statisticians. I then explore the credibility imperatives confronting government statisticians and note that they can be predicted to emphasise the complexity of their work, as well as their competence and neutrality. They also face an imperative to illustrate the policy usefulness of their statistics. Finally, I elaborate on the role that institutions play in creating settings for the dramatic performances of politicians and statisticians. I explain how state structures, state cultures and administrative traditions are theoretically predicted to influence the credibility of different performances.

The chapter demonstrates the primacy of ‘the procedural’ in overarching US and European policy documents, as well as in discourses of ‘democracy promoters’. It argues that the underlying structural power dynamics of Jordanian authoritarianism are fundamentally ignored, as the Jordanian regime is in important ways portrayed as a mere result of a lack of capacity among Jordanians at large and at times even as an agent of democratisation. Based on an in-depth analysis of a USAID-commissioned assessment of its Democracy and Governance portfolio in Jordan, and of a political party training event funded by USAID and implemented by the IRI, the chapter discusses different modes of institutional reproduction, as well as the self-perpetuating tendencies of ‘democracy promotion’ in the face of seeming practical failure. Ultimately, the chapter contends that external attempts at ‘democracy promotion’ only strengthen authoritarian stability in the country. Such interventions are thus shown to directly accept, depend on and reinforce the Jordanian regime’s questionable reform narrative, which problematises the imagined ‘Jordanian non-democratic other’ instead of authoritarian structures of power.

This chapter discusses the ideological background and origin of the idea of ‘democracy promotion’ and different approaches to its study. It argues that the moral authority claimed for ‘democracy promotion’ features the same totalitarian character as Enlightenment thought and ultimately relies on the absence of context. In order to protect the imagined moral hierarchies upon which the idea of ‘democracy promotion’ so fundamentally depends, ‘democracy promotion’ is thus shown to operate via different processes of depoliticisation, technocratisation and decontextualisation. Followed by a discussion of the conceptual dominance of procedural democracy in both ‘democracy promotion’ research and practice, it discusses select policy-oriented and more critical studies of ‘democracy promotion’. The book’s approach is described as both practice-oriented and combining a focus on material and ideational factors. Finally, it provides a brief overview of select US and European ‘democracy promotion’ organisations active in Jordan, describes the book’s methodology and sources, and outlines the key arguments of the different chapters.

In October 2016, The Guardian published a story about what it called ‘The Cult of the Expert’, which had dominated the first decade of the twenty-first century (Mallaby, 2016). Following the global financial crisis, the chair of the US Federal Bank, Ben Bernanke, was asked by a congressional committee whether he had $85 billion to inject into the economy. ‘I have $800 billion’, he replied. ‘Somehow’, the Guardian noted, ‘America’s famous apparatus of democratic checks and balances did not apply to the monetary priesthood. Their authority derived from technocratic virtuosity’. Scholars have noted since the 1990s how political issues have tended to be put in the hands of so-called experts; scientists, lawyers, clinicians, economists and the like (Fischer, 1990; Barker and Peters, 1993; Hoppe, 1999; Maasen and Weingart, 2006). As political scientist Alasdair Roberts argued in his evocative 2011 book The Logic of Discipline, ‘the pervading sense was that liberal democracies lacked the capacity to make hard choices and that mechanisms were necessary to force those choices or empower technocrat-guardians who would make them on society’s behalf’ (Roberts, 2011, p. 144). Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Francis Fukuyama’s famously flawed ‘End of History’ thesis, ‘by the turn of the 21st century, a new elite consensus had emerged: democracy had to be managed’ (Mallaby, 2016).

In October 2016, The Guardian published a story about what it called ‘The Cult of the Expert’, which had dominated the first decade of the twenty-first century (Mallaby, 2016). Following the global financial crisis, the chair of the US Federal Bank, Ben Bernanke, was asked by a congressional committee whether he had $85 billion to inject into the economy. ‘I have $800 billion’, he replied. ‘Somehow’, the Guardian noted, ‘America’s famous apparatus of democratic checks and balances did not apply to the monetary priesthood. Their authority derived from technocratic virtuosity’. Scholars have noted since the 1990s how political issues have tended to be put in the hands of so-called experts; scientists, lawyers, clinicians, economists and the like (Fischer, 1990; Barker and Peters, 1993; Hoppe, 1999; Maasen and Weingart, 2006). As political scientist Alasdair Roberts argued in his evocative 2011 book The Logic of Discipline, ‘the pervading sense was that liberal democracies lacked the capacity to make hard choices and that mechanisms were necessary to force those choices or empower technocrat-guardians who would make them on society’s behalf’ (Roberts, 2011, p. 144). Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Francis Fukuyama’s famously flawed ‘End of History’ thesis, ‘by the turn of the 21st century, a new elite consensus had emerged: democracy had to be managed’ (Mallaby, 2016).