Institute for the Study of the Americas Speakers: Chaired by Iwan Morgan (Professor of United States Studies, ISA) and includes David Chandler (Professor of International Relations, Westminster University), Adam Quinn (Lecturer in International Studies, Department of Political Science and International Studies, Birmingham University) and Matthew Alan Hill (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, ISA).The aim of the panel is to explore how the conclusions reached in Matthew Hill’s recently published Routledge monograph can be applied to the international community’s recent involvement in Libya. The monograph, 'Democracy Promotion and Conflict-Based Reconstruction: The United States & Democratic Consolidation in Bosnia, Afghanistan & Iraq', examines contemporary US democracy promotion and advances three central conclusions that will be discussed by the panel. First, Hill contends that USAID’s mission design in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq was based on transition theory. There was some degree of case-specificity in that the strategy responded to local conditions but nonetheless it was still based on a blueprint design as demanded by the logic of ‘any place, any time’. Second, the three mission strategies and the theory behind them were responsible for hampering the three countries’ successful consolidation of democracy. A particular failure was the inability to fully map out how to develop liberal normative behaviour and local ownership of that process. Third, the principle motivation behind US action is realist-understood national interest, albeit framed by the language of values. Ultimately, if interests and values do not coincide, then the US will pursue interests over values.It is recognised within the democratisation field that recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have impacted the internationals’ approaches to democracy promotion. The question is how far do the lessons from these experiences carry? Do they go beyond rhetoric and into policy and implementing-strategies? An illustration demonstrating that—rhetorically at least— lessons are being learnt can be found in recent presidential and prime ministerial pronouncements about the importance of locals determining their path to democracy. In a joint press conference on May 25, 2011, Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama both spoke on the importance of letting the locals not internationals dictate the democratisation of the Middle East and North Africa. Cameron, in an acknowledgement to contemporary discussions in democratisation studies, stated that “Democracy is built from the ground up. You’ve got to work with the grain of other cultures, and not against them. Real change takes time.” Equally, Obama claimed that, although the US and the UK were “committed to doing everything that we can to support peoples who reach for democracy and leaders who implement democratic reform,” this “pursuit of self-determination must be driven by the peoples of the region and not imposed from the outside.”