This paper first discusses the current situation in Afghanistan, including ongoing security issues and the status of state institutions. It then focuses specifically on the state of the judiciary, its legal and historical underpinnings. Finally, the paper addresses the key challenges in building a justice system in Afghanistan, and the role of the international community in this process.

Among the constellation of states with interesting constitutional stories to tell, tiny Moldova holds a unique place. It is one of only a handful of countries that has ever switched the structure of its constitutional system midstream without experiencing a democratic breakdown. Whereas some countries, such as Nigeria, have been able to adopt a different kind of constitution following their return to democracy - after a military or authoritarian regime has been swept from power - only a handful have ever managed to change their institutions midstream without experiencing such an intervening crisis.

We assess the factors affecting national administrative rationalization in the context of the current worldwide movement for governance reforms. Focusing on indicators of corruption control, the rule of law, bureaucratic effectiveness, and investment openness, we conduct cross-national and longitudinal analyses for the period 1985-2002. First, we find a modest overall expansion of rationalization in countries worldwide, with the most substantial changes occurring in developing countries and previously communist countries. Change is mostly on the specific indicator of investment openness. Second, we find that national change tends to reflect links with global society - expanded trade, the penetration of scientific logics, and embeddedness in world organizational activity play prominent roles. We conclude, then, that the rationalization of national governance, as with a good many other dimensions of modernization, is not simply or principally a consequence of endogenous national development or social complexity. Rather, it directly reflects international trade, and institutional linkages with wider rationalizing movements in the current context of a neoliberal world polity.

This paper presents an institution - the Community Responsibility System (CRS) - which presents a missing link in our understanding of market development. The CRS fostered market expansion throughout pre-modern Europe by providing the contract enforcement required for impersonal exchange characterized by separation between the quid and the quo over time and space. It supported market expansion because it did not entail the high marginal cost of establishing new exchange relationships based on a reputation mechanism or the high fixed cost associated with establishing an effective centralized legal system. Merchant communes, motivated by concern over their collective reputations, utilized their local and partial intra-community legal institutions to discipline members who cheated in inter-community exchange and to create the organizational infrastructure required for anonymous merchants to credibly reveal their identities. The CRS endogenously declined as the trade it fostered undermined its self-enforceability. Depending on the prevailing political conditions, it was gradually replaced by a centralized legal system based on personal (rather than collective) legal responsibility and supported by the state. This institutional dynamic supports the view that long-distance trade impacts economic growth through its influence on intra-state institutional development.

A recurring theme in the sociology of education is that schooling produces citizenship or a sense of membership in the nation-state. Much of the literature on civic education explores this theme, either lamenting school failures in this arena or fearing that hyper-successful schools will create massive conformity. Different though these perspectives are they share the premise that schooling is designed to produce national citizens with the national heritage and the nation-state as the crucial and bounded referential standards. This premise is challenged by the development of the human rights movement and its more recent human rights education focus. Human rights has emerged as an influential discourse and this discourse is changing from a solely legal to a broader human rights education focus. Civic education, once the central curricular area for teaching national citizenship, now teaches global citizenship and incorporates a rights discourse that extend beyond national borders.

This volume centers on the movement toward global legal standards, an increasingly recognized dimension of the quest to improve the rule of law. Although the drive to make law uniform across disparate political jurisdictions has a rich and imposing history, the contemporary enterprise to enact and enforce standard legal norms and procedures in fields as diverse as the law of companies, financial regulation, labor, constitutional dimensions of trade disputes resolution, environment and criminal procedure is clearly a growth industry. On the surface, the primary question posed by explaining this push toward standardization is why standard setting is emerging as a more prominent mechanism through which legal uniformity is pursued. There are numerous traditional and contemporary modes of extending the law across polities, among which the recent trend toward standardization commands particular attention. But just below the surface lie two related questions posed by the multiple movements toward legal homogenization.

Suicide attacks occur in the context of a conflict between warring groups, supported by an organization and sometimes even by families and communities which proudly sacrifice their children. Their design and planning, the construction of weapons and associated equipment, the recruitment of trainers and attackers, and the actual execution all occur within a group engaged in a conflict. Understanding the use of suicide attacks as a tactic of war requires understanding all the factors identified in the study of diplomacy and military strategy - military capability of the warring parties, terrain, payoffs and costs, etc. But that is not enough. Understanding suicide attacks also requires heightened attentiveness to support among the general population, for suicide attacks would not long endure without popular support. Understanding the social climate is thus a key ingredient in understanding suicide attacks.

The rule of law is a concept much in use to identify what is missing in many countries. It is a widespread and frequently repeated truism that the world in general, and the developing world in particular, needs "the rule of law." Most people do not have a very precise idea of what they mean when they invoke the rule of law. The reference is rich in historical and doctrinal connotations and therefore suggestive of meaning that is, however, hard to pin down.

The conundrum is plain to anyone who wants to see it. On the one side, autocratic regimes in the Greater Middle East complain that without a "resolution" of the Arab-Israeli conflict they cannot accept calls for extensive political, social or even market reforms. The end of "Israeli occupation", we are told, is a sine qua non for domestic change and there could be no real progress without "justice" for the Palestinians. Putting aside for the moment the logic of these claims, it is clear that crying foul and vilifying Israel is highly convenient for the region's authoritarians-serving at once to divert public anger, justify political oppression, excuse sclerotic economies and resist exogenous pressures to democratise. Yet on the other side, the notion that ambitious strategies for Middle East democratisation can be effectively pursued in isolation from the Arab-Israeli conflict is erroneous, for two very different sets of reasons:

This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. In our model, political integrationbetween two countries results in a positive country size effect and a negative effect through reduced openness vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Additional effects stem from possible changes in other growth determinants, besides country size and openness, when countries are merged. We estimate the growth effects that would have resulted from the hypothetical removal of national borders between pairs of adjacent countries under various scenarios. We identify country pairs where political integration would have been mutually beneficial. We find that full political integration would have slightly reduced an average country's growth rate, while most countries would benefit from a more limited form of merger, involving higher economic integration with their neighbors.