ABSTRACT
Reform Thyself is one of the key recommendations put forward by the Carnegie Democracy and Rule of Law paper. Operationalising the insights from political economy analysis, that societies are already governed through a deep and irretrievable social dimension. This chapter extrapolates the mechanisms and logic of this self-referential form of democracy promotion. It traces the growing realisation that any perception of reality is always filtered through social norms and customs so that all access to reality is irreducibly subjective. The discussion here seeks to highlight how statebuilding as a new trope offers a discursive framing that allows a self-critique of universal assumptions and abstract knowledge through the existence of the local as a reality not amenable to the universal. A political economy perspective enables statebuilders to realise that on reality's deeper level everything is there already: institutions, power, politics, and governance.
