There is a temptation to think that democracy has triumphed as the world’s dominant governmental paradigm. In one sense this is undoubtedly true. The world’s strongest and most stable nations tend to be democratic, and the influence of their practices and ideas has helped produce broad democratization in recent years. But democracy’s success as practiced varies widely around the world, and the fate of the so-called “third wave” of democracy is uncertain. This issue’s symposium evaluates the state of democracy today and identifies its main challenges.

Our conversation with Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria develops some of these challenges by highlighting the distinction between democratic governance and constitutional liberalism. According to Zakaria, established democracies should facilitate the spread of capitalism, which leads to the growth of basic liberal institutions. Continuing this theme of democratic cooperation, Adrian Karatnycky, president of Freedom House, considers policies appropriate for the different challenges confronting troubled democracies. Frequently, he argues, the key to democracy’s success is the cultivation of civil society.

Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, offers a pointed critique of democratic assistance. Policies that involve intervention might become imposition, he claims, and the nongovernmental organizations that so often work for democratization are influenced by leading democratic states through financial channels. The potential result is a handicapped effort to create autonomous democratic states.

The symposium then turns to address three geographic regions where the issues raised in earlier articles are considered in practice. First, Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, examines the perilous state of Russian democracy. He describes how specific attributes, ranging from a free press to the presence of a robust class of legal professionals, can resist forces that cause “backsliding” toward autocracy. Next, Gerardo Munck, associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, considers Latin America, a remarkably democratic region that nonetheless faces unique political obstacles, including corruption and economic inequality. Finally, Joel D. Barkan, professor of political science at the University of Iowa, describes the history of African democratization with an eye to its future.