Not long into the twenty-first century, the world looks very different from 1989, when international development policy turned so sharply towards the ‘rule of law’ paradigm. War seemed very distant then: today it is a persistent and apparently unshakable element of the political landscape. Climate change had just been recognised as an international concern; but it is only now beginning to expose the defects of international policy. Despite the wealth-generating boom of the last two decades, prosperity has not spread: by 2010, more people lived in slums and more were exposed to hunger than at any time in the past. The easy optimism of the early 1990s has, it now seems, long since dissipated into threat, risk and insecurity.

To what extent has insistent promotion of the ‘rule of law’ model sketched above contributed to the shape of developments over two decades? A study like the present cannot answer this question. It does show, however, that the rule of law policy mix has been more concerned with the generation than the distribution of wealth, that it does not lend itself to broad big-picture policy orientations of a kind presumably indispensable to managing large-scale problems like climate change, and that it is clearly designed to assist and facilitate resource transfers, to minimise labour costs and to reduce tax revenues, all of which might be expected to produce the kind of precariousness that might in turn be expected to underpin conflict.