The Rule of Law discourse has come to dominate the legal reform agenda in developing and transitional countries since the early 1990s. This discourse has been employed by international development agencies to promote a variant of the ‘law and development’ agenda, as well as international financial institutions which have developed complex quantitative measures of the rule of law and governance to chart their policy interventions in developing or post-revolutionary states. Christopher Waters has edited a collection of articles which makes an important contribution to this blossoming field of literature by examining the ‘state of law’ in the three South Caucasian countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The use of the phrase ‘state of law’ in the title is misleading in so far as the organizing idea for this collection of articles is the definition of the ‘rule of law’ by Thomas Carothers, a central issue to which we shall return later in this review.
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