Several years ago, Kremlin public relations specialists coined the term "managed democracy" to describe the unique features of Russia's evolving political system. As the label faded in appeal and explanatory power, this same team of communication specialists floated a new term, "sovereign democracy," as a new way to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime. The new moniker cleverly fused a nationalist notion with an ideal regime type. To date, the adjective does more to capture the essence of the Russian regime than does the noun. This new focus on "sovereignty" rather than democracy as the most important element of the Russian political system captures the real essence of Putin's political reforms.

The democracy-promotion toolbox has been filled for more than two decades with various standard assistance programs, including technical support for reforming government agencies; training for lawyers, journalists, political party leaders, and trade unionists; direct financial aid for civil society organizations; and exchanges and scholarships for students. Today, the U.S. government, particularly the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and an army of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often funded by USAID, the National Endowment of Democracy, or the Asia and Eurasia Foundations, continue to use such nonmilitary methods to promote democracy in dozens of countries around the world.

This Article conducts a theoretically informed critical analysis of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). Using primary data - including interviews with the chief architects of the new policy - and drawing upon compliance theory in both international law and international relations scholarship, it seeks to conceptualize and evaluate what is arguably the European Union's (EU) most ambitious plan of "governance export" to date. As such, the Article develops the nascent literature on the EU's growing attempts to project its values, rules, and institutions beyond the enlargement process. Part I of the Article positions this literature within the broader historical development of European integration studies, distinguishing between "bottom up," "top down," and "top out" academic perspectives. Part II outlines the legal and institutional features of the ENP. Looking beyond the confines of formal EU documents, Part III seeks to account for the motivations and conceptual building blocks of the new policy. Part IV then turns to critically address some of the key issues posed by the ENP. Using comparative methods, the first section of Part IV argues that the ENP closely mimics concepts and instruments first developed by the Commission in the preaccession process of the Central and Eastern European countries, and subsequently replicated in the Stabilization and Association Process used by the EU in the Balkans. The design of the ENP so far, therefore, suffers from almost reflexive reliance on prior models which may not be suitable to the challenges the ENP attempts to address. Finally, the second section of Part IV addresses the critical question of the likely effectiveness of the ENP in encouraging political and economic liberalization in targeted countries. Where the incentive of membership is absent, can the EU solicit compliance with its rules?

Comparative educational research has influenced the development of the world society perspective as surely as the world society perspective has shaped research directions in comparative education. Rooted in neoinstitutional ideas emphasizing the extent to which actors and activities are profoundly constructed and influenced by their environments, the world society perspective imagines world models or blueprints of progress and justice that give rise to and increasingly standardize nation-states,

organizations, and individuals. The role of education and educationally certified professionals in the overall process of standardization is a core premise in this perspective and a recurring feature of comparative educational research motivated by this perspective. The universalistic character of these models and the formal rationality associated with them facilitates standardization, in aspiration and policy, if not always in practice. Simply put, what all of this means is that we increasingly live in a world in

which there are shared standards about who is a person, what constitutes an organization, and what does a nation-state look like. Furthermore, there is a sense that those entities not in the know can learn to become and act like proper nation-states, organizations, and individuals. How else can one explain the proliferation of expertise roaming the world with the latest word on learning to learn, benchmarking, accountability, transparency, democracy, civil society and other virtues de jour!

Much of the empirical research which situated the world society perspective on the comparative education map is well known and has been summarized elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the two global trends that serve as corner stones of the world society research edifice are the enormous expansion of educational enrollments at all levels and the expanded scope of the aims and uses of education and the plethora of educational organizations that embody and elaborate these purposes. Ours is truly a world certificational society. There are of course alternative ways of accounting for the rise and impact of the world certification society. And, these in turn have raised critiques of the world society perspective, critiques often centering on issues of agency and power. These critiques are not without merit, but unfortunately, they often lead to exaggerated and culture free understandings of agency and to oversimplified notions of power cum coercion which underestimate the authority and influence of world cultural models.

In this paper I first briefly reiterate some of the main ideas of the world society perspective and explore its roots in neo-institutional theories. Next, I identify a direction of future theorizing and research which both challenges and extends the world society perspective and comparative education research. I first propose to distinguish between institutionalized domains and contested terrains. A clearer understanding of the former is enhanced by the explicit recognition of the latter. Thirdly, I apply this distinction to the question of the role of education in the political incorporation process. The transformation of the masses into citizens via mass schooling is an established theme in comparative political sociology, which has strongly influenced key strands of world society driven research. Here I emphasize a second distinction, one between earlier issues of exclusion versus inclusion and current issues regarding the terms of

inclusion. Lastly, I reflect on the changing character of the polity to which one is offered membership in the education based incorporation process. Much of the literature continues to privilege the nation-state and national citizenship. But there is also an emerging literature on human rights and even human rights education. So, I conclude by distinguishing between national citizenship and world or transnational citizenship.

External-led state building is at the forefront of international security governance; it has been called "a growth industry"; and it is, against the backdrop of the US-led intervention in Iraq, more controversial than ever. Since the end of the cold war, the UN have launched more than 60 missions in 24 countries. Whilst the primary objective of all of these missions was to monitor, keep, enforce or build peace, a second objective, which is intrinsically linked to the first, was to contribute directly or indirectly to the reestablishment of functioning state-hood. Peace-building mission have become state-building missions. There are two broad reasons for this. First, fragile states are seen as a risk to both their societies and to international security. And second, it is now broadly assumed that one vital condition for sustainable peace is that the state-apparatus has the capacity to exercise core functions of state-hood in an efficient, non-violent and legitimate way. Consequently, peace-building is more and more seen as state-building, and this evolution is reflected in both UN strategy documents, and the development aid strategies of most nation states.

It is against this background that the need for a systematic evaluation of successes and failures of external-led state building emerges. This in turn requires a framework that enables a cross-case comparison of outcomes of external-led state building efforts.

This paper has two objectives: First, I propose a framework that allows for the tracing of the absolute and the relative state-building progress of countries hosting a state-building operation. I argue that "success" should be disaggregated and measured along five dimensions: the absence of war, the reestablishment of a full monopoly over the means for violence, economic development, democracy, and institutional capacities. I discuss at some length the implications for data collection and proxying these measures of success. Secondly, I evaluate the outcome of 17 UN-led peace-building operations, using a new data set. I compare the successes and failures of state-building along these five dimensions against three hypothetical scenarios: The first one is "more is better." In this scenario, it is assumed that the more intrusive the intervention, the more successful the outcome. The second scenario can be called "less-is-more" and assumes that too intrusive missions are counterproductive, because they hinder the endogenous emergence of stable statehood. The third scenario is the "trade-off-scenario." Here, it is assumed that more intrusive interventions produce better outcome in some policy fields and worse in others. This then would point to existing trade-offs between different objectives of state building. Rather than assuming that all good things go together, in the "trade-off"-scenario the success in one dimension (for example democracy) comes at the expense of less success in another dimension (for example economic development).