The mundane counts more than the philosophical
Freedom and peace are essential to human development , but ironically they are also abstract concepts that don ’ t necessarily register when someone is starving , freezing or unable to find clean drinking water . At its foundation , government at any level is expected to provide physical safety to a population ; if its presence is not experienced through critical services like the provision of water , sewage and power , it will be ignored or resisted regardless of how conceptually high-minded it is . The vacuum produced by that failure to provide essential services is easily filled by other entities , which create competitive sources of authority . Those effective authorities — criminal , insurgent or simply sub-national — will rapidly begin to take on more legitimacy than the formal government . Examples of this include Hamas and Hezbollah in their respective areas of control in the Gaza strip and Lebanon , where these groups command greater respect than the national government in one case , and the representative government in the other . It is in fact critical to incorporate locally respected structures of authority and legitimacy , however it is just as critical to help ensure they operate within a context rather than becoming the context .
A fatal shortcoming of USIP ’ s Day After report is its almost exclusive focus on the construction and establishment of functioning state-level justice and governance in Syria . The report ’ s table of contents lists the rule of law , transitional justice , security sector reform and electoral reform / forming a constitutional assembly , constitutional design and economic restructuring and social policy ” as chapter headings . 27
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