Rule of law literature distinguishes between ‘economic’ and ‘political’ rule of law assistance – between market promotion, on one hand, and state-building in the interests of ‘peace and security’, on the other. Both deployments are now in wide circulation among a broad series of actors, though there is a disciplinary divide: those who mean market-structuring by ‘rule of law’ rarely use the term in reference to ‘peace and security’ and vice versa. This chapter looks at the latter phenomenon, comprising law enforcement and institution building: police and prison systems, crime prevention, the creation of judiciaries and protection of human rights. In a first section I will lay out ‘peace and security’-related rule of law assistance of, first, the United States, followed by the United Nations. In a second section, having laid out the main activities, I will examine some implicit questions raised by this deployment of the language of the rule of law.

THE UNITED STATES

Since 1985, the United States has supported criminal justice and ‘security sector reform’ (SSR) throughout the world. This work – which involves training investigators and prosecutors, building and equipping prisons, helping draft laws against terrorism, transnational crime and corruption, and training police and military officers – has traditionally fallen to entities other than USAID. Three key actors are the Department of Justice's International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) and Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance, and Training (OPDAT) and the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), initially created to run ‘counternarcotics’ programmes in Latin America.