How Security Guarantees Are Quietly Trading Away Democracy

A striking new study published in Discover Global Society argues that one of the defining political phenomena of the twenty-first century has been hiding in plain sight: governments around the world are exchanging democratic accountability for military protection, economic support, and diplomatic backing from powerful states. The researcher, Chick Edmond of the University of Bamenda, names this process “protection diplomacy” and presents it as a structural tension embedded in the contemporary international order rather than a series of isolated national failures. Drawing on qualitative comparative analysis of cases from the Sahel, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, the study contends that security partnerships many observers assumed would consolidate democracy have instead accelerated its erosion, and that the states supplying security assistance are not neutral guarantors of stability but active co-producers of governance outcomes abroad.

The intellectual backdrop to this argument is a profound shift in how the international community treats democracy. In the immediate post-Cold War period, peace-building missions, international interventions, and security sector reform were explicitly conceived as vehicles for democratic governance, and Western security aid was frequently conditioned on liberalization, elections, and human rights commitments. That orientation collapsed rapidly after the early 2000s, the study argues, as terrorism, irregular migration, cyber-attacks, and renewed geopolitical rivalry pushed governments and international institutions toward “security first” models. Democracy conditionality was relaxed or abandoned in favor of reliable security partnerships, and authoritarian-leaning regimes received tolerance as long as they delivered cooperation. Democracy was reframed as an aspirational goal rather than an immediate imperative, creating a widening gap between rhetorical commitments and practical governance that forms the empirical basis of the research.

Protection diplomacy, as defined in the study, is a strategic exchange in which states secure regime survival and territorial protection through international guarantees, thereby reducing their dependence on domestic democratic legitimacy. Unlike conventional alliances built on reciprocity or shared values, these arrangements are characterized by asymmetry, dependence, and explicit political tradeoffs: states relinquish some measure of democratic input in exchange for military assistance, intelligence sharing, diplomatic cover, or financial aid. Crucially, the framework is not limited to autocracies. Authoritarian, hybrid, and democratic systems all engage in protection diplomacy when survival is at stake, which is precisely why the study treats it as a structural feature of modern international politics rather than a pathology of any single regime type.

The theoretical machinery behind the argument combines securitization theory from the Copenhagen School, critical political economy, and relational sovereignty. Securitization theory describes how political elites define an issue as an existential threat requiring extraordinary measures, suspending the deliberation, transparency, and accountability that normally constrain executive power. The study’s innovation is to show how foreign security commitments stabilize and prolong these threat narratives. When external patrons legitimize a regime’s definition of a security need, they lower the political cost of repression and rights restrictions. Emergency governance, once framed as temporary, becomes the normal way of doing business, and the distinction between emergency politics and ordinary politics dissolves. External actors, preferring predictable security partners over unpredictable reformers, remove the international pressure that might otherwise push regimes to de-securitize.

Relational sovereignty supplies the second analytical pillar. Against the idea that sovereignty confers untrammeled discretion, the study argues that sovereignty is socially constructed within an international hierarchy in which weaker states trade autonomy for protection, economic benefits, or recognition. Formal independence is retained while substantive autonomy narrows. External guarantors become de facto underwriters of regime stability, gaining influence over domestic political trajectories without public acknowledgment, while the norms of non-interference are formally observed. Drawing on hierarchy theory, the study notes that compliance in protection diplomacy extends beyond foreign policy alignment into domestic governance itself: border security becomes conditional on regime stability rather than democratic character, and democratic accountability comes to be seen as a liability rather than an asset within these hierarchical relationships.

From this framework the study derives four causal propositions. First, international security guarantees substitute for popular consent, reducing the cost of suppressing dissent. Second, international acceptance of a regime’s threat framing institutionalizes securitization and normalizes emergency government. Third, accountability shifts from citizens toward the foreign patron, weakening electoral and civic oversight even when elections continue. Fourth, and perhaps most counterintuitively, the short-term stabilization achieved through protection diplomacy generates long-term fragility, as institutional erosion, diminished legitimacy, and dependency cycles accumulate. The causal sequence runs from security assistance through internationally legitimized securitized governance, to executive centralization, to democratic erosion, and finally to a feedback loop in which growing instability deepens reliance on external security assistance, perpetuating the cycle.

The empirical cases illustrate how the same causal chain produces regionally distinct forms of erosion. In the Sahel, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso cooperated for years with France, the United States, and the European Union on counterterrorism while domestic institutions collapsed. In Mali, a national state of emergency transferred sweeping authority to the armed forces, civil liberties restrictions expanded, oversight mechanisms were bypassed, and security assistance flowed directly to executive and military institutions without accountability. The study documents how external recognition of military leadership empowered officers, hollowed out civilian institutions, and contributed to a wave of military coups, after which international partners adapted by continuing to cooperate with military elites rather than terminating partnerships. Western criticism of human rights abuses remained largely symbolic and irregular, while counterterrorism operations displaced civilians and deepened grievances.

Eastern Europe demonstrates that protection diplomacy can operate inside formal democratic alliances. Hungary and Poland, both NATO and European Union members, received extensive security assurances that multiplied after geopolitical tensions with Russia reignited in 2014, weakening the leverage available to enforce democratic conditionality. Hungary’s government consolidated control over courts, media, and civil society under justifications of national cohesion and security, while the V-Dem Institute recorded a fall in the country’s liberal democracy score from nearly 0.80 in 2010 to approximately 0.30 in 2023, and Freedom House downgraded Hungary from Free to Partially Free in 2019. Elections continued, and opposition victories such as the Budapest mayoral races showed that competition persisted, but the study argues that protection diplomacy devalues elections rather than eliminating them. The European Union’s sanction mechanisms proved slow and consensus-bound, allowing illiberal normalization to proceed within the liberal international order itself.

The Middle East case shows the regime-focused variant in its starkest form. Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf monarchies rely on large-scale military support and diplomatic backing legitimized by regional instability. After the Arab Spring, external actors pivoted toward protecting incumbent regimes, treating democratic reform attempts as threats to stability. Egypt illustrates the pattern: despite a brief pause in some deliveries, the United States continued providing over 1.3 billion dollars per year in military assistance after the 2013 military takeover, while emergency law has been continuously extended since 2017, enabling broad detention powers and restrictions on assembly, and opposition figures have been prosecuted under counterterrorism charges. The study highlights the irony that security arrangements designed to produce stability instead bred insecurity, as coercion replaced legitimate political channels and external actors were repeatedly drawn back into crises of their own making.

The study’s conclusions carry significant implications for international relations theory and policy. Liberal theories have long assumed that security provision creates conditions for democratic consolidation; protection diplomacy shows the opposite can occur, meaning security agreements must be understood as governance mechanisms rather than merely strategic arrangements. Because democratic backsliding is co-authored by international and domestic processes, responsibility for it crosses borders, yet existing global governance frameworks contain no mechanism for assigning that responsibility. The study recommends differentiated democratic conditionality tailored to each donor, structural rather than merely declaratory de-securitization, security assistance that builds civilian institutions alongside military capacity, multilateral accountability mechanisms with democratic indicators and transparent agreements, and ultimately a reframing of security as a democratic public good in which citizens participate rather than an executive privilege. Without such reforms, the research warns, the short-term gains of protection diplomacy will continue to undermine the long-term institutional resilience on which both security and democracy ultimately depend.

Subject of Research: The relationship between external security guarantees and democratic erosion in the contemporary multipolar international order

Article Title: The tradeoff between democratic governance and external security guarantees in a multipolar order

Article References: Edmond, C. (2026). The tradeoff between democratic governance and external security guarantees in a multipolar order. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 224. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00557-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00557-6

Keywords: protection diplomacy, democratic backsliding, securitization, sovereignty, security alliances, Sahel, Eastern Europe, Middle East, authoritarianism, international relations, global governance, counterterrorism