ABSTRACT
Liberalization at the Margins is an aid allocation strategy that focuses on secondary recipients for democracy promotion. What are the i) policy, ii) research, and iii) political and normative implications of this strategy? The chapter addresses these questions in three parts. First, it takes the perspective of a mid-level policymaker and help them anticipate both the resistance by other governmental agencies with other policy priorities as well by autocrats who are opposed to democratization. Second, it suggests extension of this theory to loan and environmental conditionalities as well as research overlaps with the democratic diffusion and the securitization literature. It also discusses ways to extract granular information and highlights the methodological of doing so. Third, it addresses the lack of leadership by contemporary liberal democracies, especially by the US. As there was no golden age of democracy promotion, the transactional nature of current US foreign policy, does not obviate the tradeoffs that come with democracy promotion. It also explains why democracy promotion will inevitably provoke an authoritarian backlash. Each choice liberal democracies make will involves painful tradeoffs. There are no silver bullets.
