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The pro-democracy and human-rights struggles – which increasingly form the backdrop for American foreign policy – are the ground in which a new field of international practices has gradually grown up, located at the crossroads of expertise and activism. To understand the dynamics of this field, in which it is hard to tell the difference between symbolic imperialism and a struggle for emancipation, the author intends to show that it emerged, paradoxically, out of oppositions which profoundly shaped the academic field in the Cold-War era. For alongside the neo-conservatives and the veteran anti-communists who inaugurated this kind of international activism, the new professionals of democracy are quite often academics who were active in the 1970s anti-imperialism struggles and human-rights movements. And it is precisely the opposition of these actors which has contributed to the emergence of a truly hegemonic expertise market which translates into professional rivalry – and consequently esprit de corps – the political struggles in which they were once engaged.