Against the backdrop of the remarkable stability of authoritarian rule in Jordan and given Jordan’s position as one of the main recipients of US and European ‘democracy promotion’ funds worldwide this presentation investigates the question of what US and European ‘democracy promoters’ in Jordan do when they promote democracy. It provides an ethnographically informed critique of the kind of liberal worldviews that underlie US and European attempts at ‘democracy promotion’ and explores the often unintended and contradictory consequences of these. Through analysis of a considerable range of original empirical material, it demonstrates how the interaction of a highly functionalist understanding of supposedly universal ideas of democracy with the local political context of Jordan (re-)produces seeming moral hierarchies, which then serve as an efficient rationale for an ongoing politics of control and intervention. The presentation seeks to challenge the vast body of normative literature on the topic, as well as critical literature, which thus far predominantly focuses on either ideational or material factors in the reproduction of ‘democracy promotion’ as a politics of domination, while however ignoring the forms of interaction between the two. In my work, I deploy both discourse and political economy approaches, in order to demonstrate the ways in which US and European efforts at ‘democracy promotion’ in Jordan produce political logics of control and intervention, and reinforce, rather than threaten authoritarian structures of power in the country, as well as deeply problematic assumptions of cultural difference. Discussing US and European attempts at ‘democracy promotion’ in Jordan through a focus on practice, my argument is based on approximately 160 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted in Jordan, Brussels and Washington DC, on access to confidential and/or thus far unpublished documents, on Arabic sources and on participatory observation of various (non-)public events. While drawing on arguments that I also make in my forthcoming book publication with Cambridge University Press, this paper will move beyond these and also explores the implications of the reinforcement of authoritarian rule via ‘democracy promotion’ for political activists struggling to resist authoritarian power. Ultimately, I suggest that although contemporary support for Jordanian authoritarianism comes under the cloak of a universally applicable morality that claims the surmounting of authoritarianism as its objective, its effect is not that different to traditional modes of imperial support for authoritarian regimes, except for making resistance against it all the harder.