The policy brief examines two obstacles to effective security sector reform in an unstable and fragile state and outlines steps to address them. The brief begins by introducing the concept and purposes of security sector reform and the poor track record of efforts to conduct security sector reform in post-conflict and conflict environments. This leads to an examination of two crucial challenges to security sector reform in unstable, fragile state environments such as Afghanistan and Iraq: the gap between the progress of civilian and military institutions in the fragile state, and the politicization of the military. It concludes by outlining
measures to address both challenges in order to advance a more effective approach to security sector reform in an unstable, fragile state.

The policy brief presents a crucial lesson on the dynamics of statebuilding in an unstable, fragile state environment: the impact of international actions and resources on the statebuilding outcome is secondary to, and highly dependent upon, the impact of the preferences and capacity of national actors. The brief begins by situating this lesson in the debate on the future of statebuilding. This leads to a presentation of two national factors that have a significant impact on the statebuilding outcome. Finally, the brief draws two strategic implications of this lesson for statebuilding in unstable, fragile state environments.

The OECD and the WTO have accumulated systematic data on the magnitude of support going to farmers as a result of farm policies. The datasets are collected for different purposes, but give a detailed picture of the evolution of these policies. This paper extends recent work on the compatibility of these two classification systems with a focus on Norway, Switzerland, the US and the EU. The results show how the OECD data set, particularly with respect to the link between direct payments and production requirements, complements that of the WTO. Many payments classified as in the WTO Green Box require production, raising the possibility that they may not be trade-neutral. Though the issue of correct notifications to the WTO is the province of lawyers, the implications for modeling and policy analysis is more interesting to economists. And the broader question of improving the consistency of the two datasets is of importance in the quest for transparency.

This work was undertaken while Mittenzwei was a Research Fellow at the Europe Center.

In-conflict state building generates unbalanced civil-military relations in the host state due to an inevitable civil-military gap. Building civilian institutions cannot match the trajectory of progress in building military institutions. The civil-military imbalance creates structural risks to the democratization of the state. This article explains the civil-military gap and its risks, examines Iraq and in particular Afghanistan, and presents steps on how to make unbalanced civil-military relations conducive to democratization by shaping the political role of the military.

This is a magisterial new account of the day-to-day practice of Russian criminal justice in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nancy Kollmann contrasts Russian written law with its pragmatic application by local judges, arguing that this combination of formal law and legal institutions with informal, flexible practice contributed to the country's social and political stability. She also places Russian developments in the broader context of early modern European state-building strategies of governance and legal practice. She compares Russia's rituals of execution to the 'spectacles of suffering' of contemporary European capital punishment and uncovers the dramatic ways in which even the tsar himself, complying with Moscow's ideologies of legitimacy, bent to the moral economy of the crowd in moments of uprising. Throughout, the book assesses how criminal legal practice used violence strategically, administering horrific punishments in some cases and in others accommodating with local communities and popular concepts of justice.