Eds. Kari Palonen, Tuija Pulkkinen, José María Rosales. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'Democratization' is a concept often used in academic book titles. Yet not many of them deal with the initial breakthrough of democratization. This research companion presents an alternative view to the widespread assumption that Western democracies should be the normative reference for the study of democratization elsewhere. Rather, it questions the universal validity of such an assumption by searching the history of European politics and by paying specific attention to the struggles of democratization accomplished outside Western Europe. This way of reading history highlights neglected dimensions of democratization such as rhetoric, conceptual change, gender and time, all of which serve as new dimensions of a topic that is seemingly well known.The authors apply a comparative approach to analysing debates in the primary sources in a number of countries and languages, with the aim of situating the results into a broader European context. The volume consists of 25 chapters distributed among four main sections that focus on European democratization from different historical and analytical perspectives. Its objective is to discuss the politics, concepts and histories involved in democratization as a complex of changes that has altered the conditions of political action and debate in the continent for the past two centuries.The sections of this title are structured as follows. The seven chapters of the first section, Concepts of Democratization, focus on the historical and typological aspects of the conceptual controversies around democratization. The six chapters of the second section, Democratization Practices, refer to the operative practices in the politics of democratization. The six chapters in