"Between 1920 and 1950 America saw an unprecedented expansion of wealth and power underwritten by technological innovation, cultural confidence, and victory in war. American elites won World War II, rebuilt the world order with America at its head, inaugurated the jet age and put a man on the...

Sub-Saharan Africa has achieved significant gains in reducing the levels of extreme poverty in recent decades, yet the region continues to experience challenges across the development indicators, including energy access, literacy, delivery of services and goods, and jobs skills, as well as low...

This report seeks to apply a social contract framing to development policy and use it to analyze the nature of social contracts in Africa. The work creates a practical framework to allow the wide applicability of a social contract lens to relevant development challenges in specific sectors,...

The recent book on ‘Violence and Social Orders’ by the Nobel Prize winner Douglass North and others distinguishes between limited access and open access states. Most states in the world remain limited access, or natural, states dominated by coalitions of elites capturing rents from the...

Societies under similar geographic and economic conditions and subject to similar external influences nonetheless develop very different types of states. At one extreme are weak states with little capacity and ability to regulate economic or social relations. At the other are despotic states...