Rule-of-law issues have precipitated some of the most destructive modern wars. Consider Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, better known as Boko Haram, a group that has wreaked havoc in northern Nigeria and the greater Lake Chad region—but began as a largely nonviolent sect of Salafi Muslims in northeast Nigeria. One of the catalysts for its move toward direct confrontations with the state was the implementation in 2009 of a law requiring motorbike riders to wear a helmet.
On its face, helmet laws are an entirely reasonable road safety reform. Yet, riders worried about possible consequences of wearing helmets and flouted the regulation. When members of a special police squad detained several members of Boko Haram—who were on their way to a funeral—for violating the helmet law in June 2009, the resulting shootout injured 17 people and sparked a broader crackdown by the Nigerian state.
In the weeks that followed, more than 700 people, including Boko Haram’s founder, were killed in the crackdown. The group then reemerged under a more radical leader, Abubakar Shekau, and the rest is blood-soaked history.
As this example shows, the events that trigger the outbreak of violence are not always headline-grabbing or sensational in themselves. In fact, they are often mundane, bureaucratic, and quotidian functions of the state.
If U.S. foreign policy is to successfully prevent political violence and instability, it has to change its approach to rule-of-law promotion. For too long, the U.S. approach has been hampered by restrictions on working with foreign police, fractured governance between multiple agencies, and small budgets.
The new rule-of-law policy adopted in 2023 by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provides a road map for more “people-centered” rule of law programming. However, this policy also comes with potential drawbacks. While empowering local activists is important, relying on them to spearhead reforms can put them at tremendous risk. The U.S. government must leverage its relationships with foreign governments to promote a rule of law that is predictable, reasonable, repeatable, and restrained. It must also display a willingness to press partner governments on rule-of-law issues.
The events in Nigeria are not a one-off. Inadequate rule of law also played a key role in escalating the current crisis in anglophone Cameroon. An ongoing separatist movement—which has engaged in brutal violence and amputations—emerged from peaceful protests demanding that the government abide by the constitution’s protections for both French and English speakers. The government’s heavy-handed response to peaceful protests included calling protesters “terrorists” and responding to demonstrations with tear gas, violence, and arrests. This crackdown served as further evidence of discrimination against anglophones and generated support for hard-liners.
Or consider the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), which fought the Colombian government for more than 50 years. The FARC emerged from a lopsided power-sharing agreement that discounted the demands of peasant farmers who had been discriminated against and exploited by big businesses. The Los Angeles Times observed in 2016 that part of the reason for the insurgency’s longevity was that “[i]n many remote communities where rule of law was weak or nonexistent, the rebels filled the void.”
The war that began in 2020 in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region similarly emerged out of political disagreements about the rule of law. A decision made by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front’s to hold elections in September 2020 in defiance of the federal government’s COVID-19-related election delay put the group at a loggerheads with the federal government. By early November, the disagreement escalated into a military conflict that according to some reports included genocidal violence.
Each of these instances brings to mind the axiom that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Yet the U.S. government has been gun-shy about rule-of- law promotion—for good reasons, as some of its previous programs aimed at training foreign police have been reported to have propped up abusive security forces. In fact, Section 660 of the Foreign Affairs Act, adopted in 1974 following several of these disastrous interventions, largely prevents the U.S. government from giving training, advice, or financial support to police, prisons, or other law enforcement forces abroad.
Rule-of-law promotion doesn’t just have to mean training police, though. Perhaps the most prominent of the United States’ rule of law promotion efforts are carried out by the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) and Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance, and Training (OPDAT). These programs began in 1986 and 1991, respectively. While ICITAP supports law enforcement and corrections, OPDAT focuses more on courts and lawyers. These are small programs; a 2020 Government Accountability Office report found that between 2014 and 2019, the U.S. government obligated ICITAP just $327.6 million, and OPDAT, just $363.5 million. This estimate may even be overstating how much funding these programs received, as obligations are not always dispersed. For comparison, in fiscal 2015, the U.S. government obligated more than $6 billion in military assistance for Afghanistan alone.
The U.S. government has acknowledged that its current rule-of-law promotion efforts are inadequate, responding by launching new initiatives such as the aforementioned “people-centered” justice approach announced by USAID in 2023. According to the report, “This is an explicit change in how we think and how we work, shifting our perspective from the institutional to the individual.”
Promoting so-called people-centered justice is an important part of localizing U.S. foreign assistance in general, to move the country away from its history of one-size-fits all and neocolonial programming. However, localizing foreign assistance cannot replace government-to-government relationships in the nation’s policy toolkit.
Effectively promoting rule of law requires two policy changes and two attitudinal changes.
The first policy change is to routinize police training by amending Section 660. Police are the “street level bureaucrats” of the rule of law. Providing more (and better) training to law enforcement officials abroad would require Washington to legalize training police abroad and put in human rights-related vetting requirements. The law has already been amended to provide exemptions for “community-based police assistance,” reflecting an understanding of the necessity of police training.
However, the exemption process is involved and can disincentivize such programs. Rather than having an extensive exemption process, routinizing police training would bring about a clearer codification of how partner countries are vetted to ensure democratic governance of the security sector. More earnest vetting processes are critical to ensuring that the United States’ foreign police support does not once again prop up abusive security forces, as it once did.
As such, reforming Section 660 should also catalyze reform of the Leahy Law, which prohibits the United States from providing training or assistance to foreign military units accused of gross human rights abuses. Washington must differentiate between training these units on ethical and people-centered practice and “assisting them” to perpetrate abuse of civilians. Units that routinely violate human rights are perhaps the most in need of training on civilian protection and de-escalation, which can prevent the escalation of conflicts into destructive and long-lasting insurgencies.
Second, the United States must expand and empower ICITAP and OPDAT. These programs are doing admirable work, but they are functionally a rounding error in the scope of the foreign policy budget, particularly when compared to spending on military assistance. Effective monitoring and evaluation of expanded ICITAP and OPDAT programs can provide a path forward for effective rule-of-law programming abroad.
Furthermore, these programs are hamstrung by their fractured governance between the State Department and the Justice Department. A whole-of-government approach to the rule of law is worthwhile; however, the current division of authority is not working. The budget for these programs should be expanded and brought under the purview of just one of those departments, to prevent bureaucratic friction from undermining timely programming.
Equally important to these reforms are two attitudinal changes. First, the U.S. government needs to understand the rule of law as a matter primarily concerning the police and the courts—not the military. While professionalizing partner militaries is a worthy goal in its own right and has certainly received considerable funding, it has limited utility for promoting the rule of law. Militaries and police forces have different rules of engagement; police are expected to show significantly greater restraint in the conduct of their activities than militaries are. Improving the rule of law to prevent conflict abroad requires that partner governments be able to investigate and prosecute violations of the law in a timely and impartial way.
Second, the U.S. government must be willing to press partner governments on rule-of-law issues. The turn toward localization in USAID’s new rule- of-law policy is a much-needed correction to some of the top-down and one-size-fits-all characteristics of U.S. foreign policy. However, Washington cannot rely only on civilians and local organizations to press for more accountable justice systems. U.S. government officials should use their privileged position to lobby for changes in high-level exchanges, free from the fears of retribution that can constrain domestic reformers.
In 2022, for example, Turkey passed a law sharply limiting free expression under the guise of countering disinformation. Domestic critics have dubbed it the “censorship law.” Though the country’s high court overturned the first conviction of a journalist under the law this May, the law still has a chilling effect on free expression, and dozens of investigations of journalists have been opened under the law. Those who are simply doing their jobs as reporters—or exercising their right to free expression—may face jail time. Turkey is a member of NATO and an important ally to the United States; the U.S. government has a responsibility to use that relationship to press Turkish officials to uphold the rule of law.
This is no small task, nor is it a panacea. The United States itself struggles to provide this sort of rule of law. Furthermore, a predictable, reasonable, repeatable, and restrained justice system will not entirely eradicate political violence. These reforms will, however, help prevent some political disagreements and state persecution from spiraling into insurgencies, and further the U.S. government’s objective of promoting global stability.
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