Not too long ago, scholars treated elections as domestic affairs for the countries holding them. Inken von Borzyskowski’s book The Credibility Challenge shows just how far we have traveled in barely a decade. It fits alongside works such as Susan Hyde’s The Pseudo-Democrat’s Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm (2011), Daniela Donno’s International Actors and the Politics of Electoral Misconduct (2013), Judith Kelley’s Monitoring Democracy (2012), and Sarah Bush’s Taming Democracy Assistance (2015). All of these works assess international involvement in democratization processes in countries, usually centering on elections (though Bush considers democracy assistance more broadly to include help for civil society). What is different and novel about Borzyskowski’s work is that it considers the impact of international involvement on elections violence. The book shows the evolution of this field from its early optimism at the promise of international engagement for democratization to a more somber assessment of the darker sides of international entanglement in the affairs of others.

Borzyskowski considers 400 elections in Latin America and Africa after the end of the Cold War. She wants to know how international involvement can lessen election violence. This focus is welcome. These regions are hard places for democracy to grow; in the words of the author, all too often, they provide “rocky soil” for the seedlings of democratic elections. Many of these countries are poor, their voters are mostly uneducated, and local leaders are all too enamored with the perks of unchecked power. And Borzyskowski faces some powerful skeptics. Scholars like Paul Collier have argued that democracy in such “dangerous places” often foments, fails to stop, or even directly facilitates violence and mayhem. Her answer—theoretically referenced as “credible election theory” and empirically substantiated with cross-country regressions, maps, and surveys—is that the international community can make elections less violent by making them more credible.

The theoretical machinery of the book follows standard treatments of elections in democratizing countries. There are an existing government and a (challenging) opposition, which are trying to, respectively, conduct credible elections and decide whether to live with the result. The novel twist is that violence can arise at any point: before, during, or after the election (the book focuses on the before and after stages). These distinctions, seldom made elsewhere, are important and productive.

The main explanatory variables are election observation and technical assistance by international organizations, mostly the UN in the latter case and any major, credible observer outfit in the former case. These actors, the argument plausibly affirms, play an outsized role in Latin America and Africa—particularly in Africa, where poverty and low capacity open a large space for intervention to have an effect.

Borzyskowski argues that technical assistance strengthens the central electoral commission, which can then produce and enforce stronger rules of the game. It also accomplishes sundry tasks such as propagating information about how to resolve grievances. This tends to reduce the attractiveness of resorting to violence both before and after elections. Election observers help collect information and help hold perpetrators of violence accountable before the elections. Although this intervention tends to reduce violence, violence may increase post-election in the wake of a credible election observer verdict of fraud.

An important strength of the book is that it specifies the who, how, when, and why of election violence. The author also develops her own measure: the number of people killed. The book is careful to note who commits violence and to what end, and it provides a very detailed cross-country empirical view of the phenomenon. Another strength is its careful attention to econometric modeling, selection effects, and causal inference. Nonrandom selection of democracy aid to recipients is, of course, the norm, not the exception and must be contended with. The book does its best to control for factors that explain both violence and aid allocation. At the end of the day, the author argues compellingly that any remaining biases work against the arguments she makes; for example, assistance goes to the places most likely to experience violence, which makes finding violence-reducing effects there very difficult. The empirical portions of the book rely primarily on cross-national election-level data. The book also draws on informative surveys in specific countries, with some of the surveys conducted by the author. In addition, Borzyskowski offers a number of short, well-chosen, and well-researched country studies to support her theory.

The evidence indicates that international involvement significantly reduces the number of people killed in election-related events, except for the case of election observers and post-election violence, where negative verdicts cause spikes in violence. Furthermore, the author makes an effort to trace the causal mechanisms behind these claims by showing, for example, that voters tend to trust observed elections and that technical assistance works by increasing central election capacity.

The book is eminently readable, with clear writing, graphs that are clean and effective, and results tables that are just right in number. The book’s organization is conventional. There are six chapters, with an introduction laying out the problem, a conclusion with policy recommendations, and four core chapters with the theory, data-collection strategy, and examinations of the pre- versus post-election periods and observation versus technical assistance.

This book will change the conversation. After its publication, scholars studying election violence will have a much richer set of theoretical and empirical propositions to consider. For example, do threats of sanctions deter governments from cracking down on rioting oppositions after stolen elections? What is the relative importance of sporadic or spontaneous violence versus that led and organized by political elites? Does geographic concentration and duration matter? The contribution this book makes is to enable us to ask even more of the questions that matter, in one of the fastest-growing academic literatures.

A strength of the book is that it aims to go beyond simple cross-country regressions and crude measures by demonstrating elements of the causal chain posited to be at work. For example, chapter 4 on technical assistance presents survey evidence from Kenya and Liberia, showing that more technical assistance increases trust in the election commission and reduces respondents’ propensity to riot. One wishes we had more of this analysis to supplement the insights coming from an adequately constructed, original, but also somewhat zoomed-out dataset at the election-country level.

It would also have been interesting to take on, more directly and more fundamentally, the objections against spreading democracy to poor and often violent places. This is an influential argument, alleging many nefarious consequences such as disorder, civil war, and corruption. True, challenging that claim is not the goal of the book. Elections do not need to turn out violent, would be the retort to some of the objections made by Collier and others. Still, it is interesting to think about whether election violence is as different from other violence as the book asserts. Perhaps violence is such an entrenched aspect of some countries’ politics that its occurrence around elections is a foregone conclusion and something not driven by international involvement.

Some open questions that this book seems to raise but not necessarily answer include the following. Why focus on these specific forms of election intervention? Is it really the case that technical assistance and election observation are the two principal ways through which the international community affects election violence? Is violence really strategically orchestrated, and what part of it may be simply rioting? The emphasis on the United Nations as an actor and on other international organizations (IOs) leaves another question open: What about state actors? Often, the United States and other powerful actors put pressure on governments to get their act together or else provide succor to local tyrants. How does the framework account for that, and how would the results change if we looked beyond IOs?

We have started to understand that foreigners have agendas that are not limited to providing free and fair elections. Lauren Pranther and Sarah Sunn Bush, in ongoing work, are showing how people perceive foreign promoters of democracy as biased and may push back against attempts to intervene. Does a similar logic not operate when it comes to election violence? Why and how states accept the help they are given and whether aid’s effects have institutional staying power would have been illuminating extensions of the argument. Finally, the rise of China has affected Africa. Yet, China and foreign power competition, more generally, do not feature prominently in this book.

The Soviet daily Pravda opined notoriously, on the eve of Finland’s first post–World War II election that elections are not to be considered sovereign affairs of the countries holding them. This book helps us understand that foreigners may affect election violence. In so doing, it contributes and moves forward an important debate. Pretending that international involvement has only salutary effects is no longer plausible. Borzyskowski shows us that there is a dark side—and offers concrete strategies for how to avoid or minimize it. The book will be of interest to scholars of democracy, area studies, and international relations. It will also interest practitioners, including the leaders of important international organizations such as the United Nations and other important international players.