The Rule of Law after the Short Twentieth Century: Launching a Global Career

In the last twenty to thirty years, rule of law as panacea has become extraordinarily popular. Today, rule of law is an international "hurrah" term, on the lips of every political leader, development agency, and world body, offered as a support for economic growth, democracy, human rights, and much else. "RoL" promotion is booming. Lots of people and organizations are contracted to work on it, lots of money is spent on it, lots of academics study it. It wasn't always so. And even though the term is everywhere, it's hard to say that we see more rule of law in the world nowadays. All sorts of thugs and murderers are not now, just as they were not then, constrained by law, whatever regimes may claim. Notwithstanding heaps of rule of law promotion, this seems unlikely to change. But my story in this chapter is about concepts and ideology, not practice, though ideology is of course a form of practice, and it affects other forms of practice as well.