In light of regime changes, how can foreign donors counteract authoritarianism and promote democracy and human rights over time? Taking an organizational institutional perspective, this paper introduces the tradition of translation studies as a way to study development processes in a legally and politically volatile setting. This is done through an analysis of thirty years (1988-2018) of funding of transnational cooperation projects promoting human rights and democracy in Soviet Union/Russia. Archival data on funding is contextualized through a range of documents chronicling legal and political development. The study finds that material and discursive elements of translations integrate into a patterned sequence over time, buffering volatile institutional conditions in their varied combinations. The translations seem to be an amalgamate of the translated ideas themselves and the critical junctures to which they are subjected. In turn, this indicates performativity of the master idea of democracy and human rights, which seems to propel itself forward in different iterations over time. For foreign donors, the study supports practices of leniency and flexibility when funding in volatile contexts, acknowledging its perils while continuing to pursue development work.
