Eric C Bjornlund

Since 1989, I have worked at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), a nongovernmental organization based in Washington, D.C., developing and managing election monitoring and electoral reform programs in more than 25 countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Namibia, Palestine, Pakistan, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand, Togo, and Zambia. As director of the NDI's Indonesia mission since the beginning of 1999, I was responsible for developing the Institute's largest program to date, in support of a democratic transition in Indonesia. During my years at NDI, I have repeatedly observed that even as the extent and influence of election monitoring has exploded and available funding has grown dramatically, many of the same mistakes continue to be made. Policymakers, journalists, scholars, and local political elites alike tend to rely on the assessments of international election observers without really understanding their methodologies, interests, and capabilities. At the same time, the international community usually ignores -- if not undermines -- national monitoring groups. But few academics have written about, or even taken note of, the phenomenon of democratic development assistance in general or election monitoring in particular, and few practitioners have seriously reflected in print on the contributions, limitations, and dangers of such efforts. Thus, I am very concerned about the future of the still-new democratic development field, the proliferation of less professional international observation efforts, and the extent of misguided attempts to help domestic monitors. This led me to conclude that a serious assessment is essential, hence my proposed research project at the Wilson Center. I came to the democratic development field after becoming interested in human rights in South Africa in college and working on international human rights cases in Namibia as a lawyer. I practiced law at Ropes & Gray, a 300-lawyer firm in Boston, Massachusetts, for several years in the mid-1980s before joining NDI in 1989 to monitor Namibia's transition elections and to research and write a book-length study of the UN role in the Namibian transition. I have testified five times about democracy in Asia before subcommittees of House International Relations Committee; I also testified about elections in South Africa before the United Nations Committee on Decolonization. I frequently write and give talks about elections, election monitoring, and democratic development and have appeared on television and radio in the United States and abroad. I have a B.A. from Williams College, an M.P.A. from Harvard University, and a J.D. from Columbia University.
 

Expertise

Democratization, Foreign Assistance to Democratic Development, Elections and Election Monitoring, Comparative Constitutional and Electoral Law, Asia (especially Indonesia, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Bangladesh), West Bank/Gaza, Southern Africa