State-Building and the Rule of Law Workshop
The State-Building and Rule of Law Workshop is a law and development course centrally concerned with bridging theory and practice. The workshop introduces the key theories relevant to state-building generally and strengthening the rule of law in particular. And it critically examines efforts to promote state-building and the rule of law in countries at a state-building stage of development. The workshop situates rule of law programs conceptually and practically with the imperative to build durable formal and informal institutions, including legal institutions, which have legitimacy and capacity and can ensure security. The workshop also critically assesses case studies as well as project documents generated by the development industry on state-building. The theoretical and applied discussions lay the foundation for the third part of the workshop: a practicum unit where students present draft project proposals, project work products or analytical papers. In the practicum unit, one group will build on the on-going project on legal education in Afghanistan, another will pursue needs in the Bhutan negotiation and mediation project. Yet another group of students will develop rule of law projects for other countries within the scope of the workshop or write analytical problem oriented papers about the challenges to building the rule of law in one or more of these countries. The set of developing countries considered within the scope of this workshop is broad. It includes, among others, states engaged in post-conflict reconstruction, e.g., Cambodia, Timor Leste, Sierra Leone; states still in conflict, e.g., Afghanistan, Somalia; the poorest states of the world that may not fall neatly into the categories of conflict or post-conflict, e.g., Nepal, Haiti; and least developed states that are not marked by high levels of violent conflict at all, e.g., Bhutan