In the last years of the armed conflict, some of the actors that have participated in those clandestine operations re-adapted their modus operandi to fit other types of criminal activities such as customs corruption, large scale smuggling of goods, extortion and kidnapping for economic purposes,...

Following a chaotic political decolonization, from 1975 to 2000, the Comoros failed to sustain the extension of private land ownership pursued since the beginning of the twentieth century and to implement land reform prepared with the assistance of the FAO and the UNDP but abandoned after the...

The evolution of the telecommunications sector is of keen interest from both a development and a political economy perspective. Telecommunications is critical to economic dynamics, to the quality of life, to social service provision, and to citizen engagement. This paper explores the political...

Quality education is a critical dimension for the achievement of sustainable development. The renewed political commitment set out in sustainable development goal 4 (SDG4) is an opportunity to ensure strong coherence between education policy and the right to education first articulated more than...

To understand why corruption has become the crucial issue for the latest generation of protest movements and uprisings, from Tunisia to Moldova and from India to Brazil, public corruption is best conceived as part of a broader social order context and not at individual level. Presuming...

Here I explore the process leading to the formation of the state in two steps. In the first part of this research note, I examine the transition from stateless to state societies, that is, I characterize the conditions under which the state arises. In the second part, I analyze the consolidation...

The weak enforcement of a rule of law is closely related to the prevalence of corruption. Corruption involves different types of rule-violations by bureaucrats, politicians and businesses where power is misused for private benefit. Not surprisingly, corruption is correlated with the weak...

This background paper addresses four questions. They may seem to be independent, but I hope to show they are closely connected. The questions are: 1) What did Weber say when he defined the modern state as the organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence? 2) What conceptual...