Building effective and durable local institutions has long been a central objective of all international efforts to foster economic development and political stability, and to build peace. Major Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 have expended billions of dollars on security sector institutions alone but, on a smaller scale, this effort is a core task of development agencies as well as security assistance missions. While there is vigorous agreement among theoreticians and practitioners on the need to build strong institutions, and a large literature on how to do so, the results have remained frustratingly limited. There have been plenty of partial successes but even in long-running and well-resourced efforts such as those in Bosnia, many institutions remain subject to a variety of pathologies.
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