ABSTRACT
What creates such an ambiguity is the undeniably mistaken idea that the universalization of a model necessarily and automatically implies the standardization and universalization of an agenda and the behaviours linked to it. This misunderstanding is generated by an underestimation of what is undertaken with regard to what the local context allows. In other words, the constraints of path dependency have been largely misjudged, and therefore the exportation of norms inherent in this illusory agenda remained poorly thought out. Oddly contrasting with the political scientist’s approach, sometimes overly concerned with the acceptance of external norms by local actors, it seems that most experts of democratization and state-building do not even imagine that the democratic set – consensual transitional government, constitution, elections, transitional justice – could be at all ill-suited to any of the situations to which it is applied. They see the democratic set as doctors might consider the protocol for multi-injured patients in emergency medicine, which takes into account only the biology of human beings and not their specific variables (Caplan and Pouligny 2005).
