Over the past decades, most international and U.S. efforts to promote the rule of law have focused primarily on the “formal” dimensions of the rule of law: fostering new or improved courts, prison systems, constitutions, statutes, and so forth. In this book, we have repeatedly emphasized that such programs, though valuable, are unlikely to reap lasting benefits unless they are integrated into the far broader project of ensuring peace, stability, and security and unless rule of law programs proceed more or less simultaneously rather than consecutively.

Without security, neither governance nor economic development programs can hope to succeed. Without viable macro-level blueprints for governance, legal and judicial reform projects may be impossible, incoherent, or self-undermining. Without moderately effective police, criminals cannot be arrested; without an adequate prison system, they cannot be detained; without courts, they cannot be tried; without lawyers, they probably cannot be tried fairly; without functioning law schools, there can be no lawyers or judges. Promoting the rule of law requires interveners to keep many balls in the air at once, and doing so presents monumental challenges.

But the challenges for interveners do not end there. However one chooses to define the rule of law, the rule of law can neither be created nor sustained unless most people in a given society recognize its value and have a reasonable amount of faith in its efficacy.