This article explores the complex empirical landscape of justice and security provision in post-war Mozambique, and its political dynamics. It scrutinises the formal policy framework, which today recognises legal pluralism. The current legislation not only fails to fully recognise the de facto role played by non-state providers, but also to acknowledge the various layers of informal interaction and competition that in practice occur between these and official state institutions. There are political reasons for this. Justice and security provision constitute a minefield of power interests and overlapping claims to authority, which have deep historical roots. State officials and the national government fear losing power if non-state actors are given clear rights and mandates. Unclear legislation also eases political instrumentalisation by politicians and power-holders. The risk is that justice and security provision becomes more about politics than about problem solving and access to justice.

This article conceptualises the EU approach to rule of law promotion outside of accession, taking Ukraine as a case study. Empirical evidence, collected through document analysis, expert interviews and participant observation, reveals that the rule of law as a legal and political category in EU external relations has little to do with the essentialist scholarly definitions of the concept. Instead, it constitutes an abstract ideal which frames bilateral cooperation at the political level and a banner under which the parties realise a variety of activities at the practical level. This EU approach is deliberate and meant to allow for defining the rule of law in harmony with the parties' integration ambitions, priorities and domestic institutional contexts. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings' implications for future policy and research.

Universal provision of legal identity, most commonly birth registration, is viewed as both an intrinsic human right and an instrumental development necessity. Legal identity is commonly associated with citizen access to certain benefits and opportunities, protection of human rights, and generation of vital statistics to inform development planning. Research conducted in Nepal, Cambodia, and Bangladesh demonstrates that significant obstacles to obtaining legal identity include financial and procedural barriers, discriminatory laws and policies, institutional incapacity, and citizens' lack of knowledge and motivation. Robust alternative markets for legal identity reveal the true public demand for identity documents. In the developing country context, the provision of legal identity alone does not necessarily deliver desired development outcomes. Thus, universal civil registration is a necessary and worthy goal, but focus should remain on the ultimate development goals behind universal registration.

New, alternative, forms of cross-border cooperation, in particular processes of informal international lawmaking (‘IN-LAW’), have emerged and gained prominence since the 2000s in response to an increasingly diverse, networked, and knowledge-based society. This transformation impacts on traditional notions of public international law as well as on the conceptualization of an emerging international rule of law. This is all the more the case given the tendency to emphasise the formal characteristics of the latter. The present article, nevertheless, challenges the assumption that informal international law is, because of its informal nature, by definition incompatible with a rule of law approach. The article thereto re-introduces a negative (shielding society from arbitrariness) and a positive (providing requirements for lawmaking) conception of the rule of law. First, it identifies actors and processes of informal international lawmaking and elucidates the extent of their reliance on legal principles as opposed to the wielding of arbitrary power on the international plane. Second, it operationalises a rule of law approach in the three phases of informal lawmaking processes (lawmaking per se, law-application and accountability). As such, it discusses how a number of concrete rule of law requirements related to participation, procedural guarantees, accessibility of norms, and accountability mechanisms are implemented. To conclude, it is submitted that rule of law theories can be reconciled with IN-LAW, without affecting the flexibility that is fundamental to the non-traditional norms produced at the global level.

Although law and order is often conflated with the rule of law, the two concepts are asymmetrically opposed. Asymmetrical opposites do not occupy poles on a scale of shared values. One is not a negative of the other, as rule of men traditionally has been to the rule of law. Nor does one occupy part of a continuum extending down from the other, like rule by law in relation to the rule-of-law ideal. They are not symmetrically related. They are opposed because their specific contents are adverse. Whereas the rule of law is characteristically concerned with eliminating arbitrariness through general rules applied juridically, law and order is primarily concerned with eliminating restlessness through particularistic injunctions delivered administratively. Different values inhere to each. Their opposition is in principle. Consequently, they cannot be conflated without obfuscating their distinctive qualities, thereby casting doubt on the meaning of the rule of law as a political ideal.