All bark and no bite? : European Union Human Rights and Democracy Advocacy & Development Aid: A case study of Myanmar and the Rohingya

The principles of human rights and democracy have been of great importance for a long time and for many actors globally, especially for the European Union. This paper has the purpose of examining the European Union’s bilateral development aid and its relation to the organisation's human rights and democracy promotion. The study is a case study of Myanmar in the years 2000-2017 and with particular focus on the situation for the Muslim minority Rohingya. The case is investigated through the perspective of Ian Manners’ Normative Power Europe supplemented with aspects collected from previous research, to see if it can explain the behaviour of the aid flow. The conclusions of this study were that human rights and democracy while appearing greatly central has not had any major influence on the aid from the Union to Myanmar, and neither can the idea of European normative power explain the nature of the aid allocation