Non-learning Within a Constellation of Communities of Practice: The Case of the EU and Its Democracy Support in the Arab World

This article addresses the puzzle of why the European Union (EU) struggles to learn from ineffective attempts to support democratization in the Arab world but instead continuously (re-)produces democracy support malpractices. To better understand this phenomenon, we draw from practice theory and conceptualize EU democracy support as practices performed by a community of insiders who act within a complex constellation of communities of practice. Due to the way in which communities function, decision-makers do not critically reflect on the background knowledge on which they base their practices and thus do not learn how to improve them. This constellation model offers a unique take on non-learning within the EU and in (policy-making) groups more generally. We illustrate the proposed conceptual framework through an empirical analysis of EU democracy support in Egypt, showing that the EU performs practices similar to those before the 2011 Revolution due to its inability to learn.