Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge

Western aid agencies prescribe rule-of-law programs to cure a remarkably wide array of ailments in developing and post-communist countries, from corruption and surging crime to lagging foreign investment and growth. Yet there is a surprising amount of uncertainty about their actual impact on these problems, as well as a lack of knowledge at many levels of conception, operation, and evaluation of the entire rule-of-law field.