This article adopts a two-tiered approach: it provides a detailed, historical account of anti-terrorist finance initiatives in the United Kingdom and United States--two states driving global norms in this area. It then proceeds to a critique of these laws. The analysis assumes--and accepts--the goals of the two states in adopting these provisions. It questions how well the measures achieve their aim. Specifically, it highlights how the transfer of money laundering tools undermines the effectiveness of the states' counterterrorist efforts--flooding the systems with suspicious activity reports, driving money out of the regulated sector, and using inappropriate metrics to gauge success. This article recognizes that both states consider the fight against terrorism to be partly military but also a matter of bringing certain democratic principles to bear. Critics have been quick to condemn some of the measures for their encroachments into civil liberties. My goal is not to measure the success of the laws according to any particular ideology but rather, accepting the governments' democracy-promoting goals, and the role these play in generating domestic and international support, to clarify which components do not appear to serve the states' aims.

This article won Stanford Law School's Carl Mason Franklin Prize for 2005-2006, for most distinguished written work in international law.

Who is Vladimir Putin?

Since the rise to power in Russia of this obscure bureaucrat and former KGB agent in the fall of 1999, two groups in the West have answered this question very differently.

For some bankers, investors and diplomats, Russian President Vladimir Putin was a godsend. On his watch, Russia's 1998 devaluation and rising oil prices began to fuel economic growth for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If not personally responsible for the turnaround, Mr. Putin did initiate reforms designed to sustain it over the long haul. He replaced the personal income tax with a 13% flat tax, cut corporate taxes, balanced the budget, paid foreign debts, legalized land ownership, supported the restructuring of the big monopolies, and even began to tackle sensitive social services reforms. Compared with the last years of Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Putin looked like a dedicated proponent of capitalism.

In parallel to this storyline of Vladimir Putin as hero, a more sinister subplot emerged. As liberal tax reforms sailed through the Russian parliament, Mr. Putin's team was implementing illiberal political changes. During the Putin era, all national television networks effectively came back under the state control. The closing of TVS last month was the final blow. Russian soldiers have continued to abuse the human rights of Russian citizens living in Chechnya. (To be sure, Chechen fighters have practiced similar inhumane tactics, but two wrongs don't make a right.) Human rights organizations have been harassed, journalists imprisoned, and Western aid workers thrown out of the country. Of course, Mr. Putin personally rarely intervened in these rollbacks of democracy. But that's the point: he did nothing to stop these obvious steps toward authoritarian rule.

These two Vladimir Putins -- economic reformer and democratic backslider -- have lived side-by-side without meeting. Business people brushed aside the crackdown on the media as a necessary response to the anarchy unleashed during the Yeltsin era. The apologists claim Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, the two media magnates who were forced to flee the country to avoid jail, got what they deserved: Mr. Putin wasn't suppressing freedom of the press, only limiting the power of corrupt oligarchs. Some bold voices in the business community even championed interim dictatorship in Russia as the only way to provide the stability for investment and economic growth.

For their part, critics of Mr. Putin's anti-democratic policies undermined the punch of their analysis by exaggerating the Russian president's ruthlessness and failing to recognize his accomplishments in other sphere. They cast Mr. Putin as a new dictator who has more in common with Stalin than Boris Yeltsin or Mikhail Gorbachev.

Last week, the arrest of billionaire Platon Lebedev brought the two Vladimir Putins together. Mr. Lebedev runs Menatep, the bank for the Yukos financial-industrial group headed by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man. Like Mr. Lebedev and others in the Yukos-Menatep organization, he made his fortune by using personal relationships with government bureaucrats to acquire state assets -- in this case, oil and mineral companies -- for a song.

When Mr. Putin first came to power, many billionaires worried the new Russian president would redistribute property rights once again, this time to a new set of cronies. Instead, Mr. Putin implicitly offered the oligarchs a deal: you keep what you had before as long you run your companies without looking for government handouts and get out of politics.

Unlike Vladimir Gusinsky or Boris Berezovsky, Mr. Khodorkovsky eagerly accepted this bargain. He and his team kept out of jail and built Yukos into one of Russia's most profitable, most transparent, and most Westernized companies. He grew to be first among equals among Russia's other oligarchs. He also began to operate differently than the rest, establishing his own foundations, charitable causes, and think tanks. In this election year, he also openly donated money to two of Russia's largest political parties, Yabloko and the Communists. Mr. Khodorkovsky calculated that all this fell within the bounds of the implicit pact between the Putin administration and the oligarchs.

Last week's arrest, and the police questioning of Mr. Khodorkovsky, suggest that the Russian president interprets the pact differently. Mr. Khodorkovsky's economic power and political ambitions threatened Mr. Putin. So the president changed the rules of the game. Economic deals of the past once thought to be beyond scrutiny are now suddenly in question. If there are now new rules, then the alleged claim against Mr. Lebedev -- that he illegally acquired assets in the 1994 privatization of the Apatit fertilizer company -- or similar ones, could be leveled against nearly every businessman who operated in Russia since the early 1990s.

If these new informal rules are being remade to scare Mr. Khodorkovsky away from politics, then the arrest of Platon Lebedev is even more sobering. It means that Russians are not allowed to try to influence electoral outcomes -- an essential feature of even the most minimal democracy. Of course, oil tycoons should not be allowed to deploy their financial resources to skew the electoral playing field. But the enforcement of campaign finance laws is the tool that most democracies use to address this problem, not random arrest.

Arbitrary rule by the state is not only undemocratic. It's bad for business. A state that isn't constrained by checks and balances, the rule of law, the scrutiny of an independent media, or the will of the voters is unpredictable at best, predatory at worst. Two weeks ago, Mr. Lebedev probably would have argued that President Putin's economic accomplishments outweighed its democratic failures. Today, he probably has a different view. So should the rest of us.

This article analyzes the supply and demand sides in nuclear smuggling, as well as intermediaries between them, based on the 700 illicit trafficking incidents collected by the Stanford Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Theft, and Orphan Radiation Sources (DSTO) for the period 1991 to 2002. The supply side consists of people with access to nuclear and other radioactive material. It can be subdivided into civilian employees at source facilities, ranging from technicians to top managers; military personnel; and security guards. Intermediaries--traffickers and middlemen--can be categorized as amateurs, opportunist businessmen and firms, and organized crime groups. The demand side is represented by proliferating nation states, terrorist organizations, religious sects, separatist movements, and criminal groups or individuals interested in using nuclear and other radioactive material for malevolent purposes, such as murder, deliberate exposure, blackmail, and extortion.

This book compares sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, two regions beset by the breakdown of states suffering from extreme official corruption, organized crime extending into warlordism, and the disintegration of economic institutions and public institutions for human services. The contributors not only study state breakdown but also compare the consequences of post-communism with those of post-colonialism.

This chapter looks at the processes of state formation in postcolonial Africa and the former Soviet Union and asks whether those processes make African and Eurasian states especially vulnerable to civil war. In particular, we ask whether the experience of Africa's postcolonial states suggests a similar historical trajectory for the new states that emerged in Eurasia at the beginning of the 1990s. We argue that, despite important differences between the two historical experiences, conditions surrounding state formation in Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia have inhibited the formation of stable and legitimate states and have made war more likely.

The chapter beings by outlining three broad explanatory factors that scholars have used in trying to explain civil wars since 1945: ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization. We argue that these explanations neglect what Klaus Gantzel referred to as "the historicity of war," by which he means "the structural dynamics which condition the emergence and behaviour of actors" in any given period (Gantzel 1997, 139). We then suggest that a focus on state formation is helpful in providing the historical context for understanding civil wars. After surveying the experience of state-building in postcolonial Africa and in Eurasia, we conclude with comparisons and contrasts between the regions.

The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project was initiated in 1997 to study the diffusion and absorption of the Internet to, and within, many diverse countries. This research has resulted in an ongoing series of reports and articles that have developed an analytic framework for evaluating the Internet within countries and applied it to more than 25 countries. (See http://mosaic.unomaha.edu/gdi.html for links to some of these reports and articles.)

The current report applies the analytic framework to compare and contrast the Internet experiences of Turkey and Pakistan, through mid-2000. Although historically these countries have not been closely related, there are significant parallels between the two that make them well suited for a comparative study of the absorption of the Internet. Turkey and Pakistan are among the largest non-Arab Muslim countries in the world. In contrast to most of their Arab counterparts, their governments were founded as secular, parliamentary democracies. Both countries have had stormy political histories, however, with periodic coups and authoritarian governments. Each country has firmly entrenched bureaucracies with closed and, to varying degrees, corrupt processes.

Their economies have been similarly troubled, with periods of relative hopefulness punctuated by stagnation and decline. Both countries have suffered from erratic growth rates, high inflation, and high deficits. For most of their histories, their economies were rather closed and autarkic.

In recent decades, each country has taken substantial steps to move toward a more open, market-oriented economy and made expansion of the telecommunications infrastructure a high priority. Each country has sought, less successfully than had been hoped, to attract foreign investment and integrate itself more fully with the global economy.

Each country has a number of national security concerns. Turkey and Pakistan both have histories of serious domestic terrorism and persistent conflict with a non-Muslim neighbor.

In spite of the macro-similarities, there are numerous differences between the two countries. Pakistan is considerably poorer and less developed than Turkey; it has had more coups and assassinations, deeper economic troughs, greater heterogeneity within its population, and more endemic corruption.

By the end of 1995, China had built the world's ten largest telecommunications networks and the industry was growing at a faster rate than any other sector of the booming Chinese economy. For example, the country's 40 million telephone subscribers with 50 million telephone numbers represented an average annual growth rate of nearly 100 percent over a ten-year period. Internet users served by ChinaNet jumped from 6,000 in 1995 to 53,739 in March 1997. Progress was qualitative as well, as China procured state-of-the-art fiber-optic and satellite technologies and narrowed the gap between itself and the United States and between its own urban and rural areas. The achievement can be attributed to the government's commitment to telecommunications as the key to further development--a commitment backed by preferential policies; to foreign financial and technical support; and to changing attitudes of the Chinese people themselves.

However, China faces some major problems. The gap in living standards between coastal and interior provinces is widening, as people migrate from poor villages to increasingly affluent cities. The government must focus more on developing isolated regions. Rapid development of telecommunications cannot be sustained under a government monopoly, which aids the government's economic and security interests but discourages foreign companies from investing and transferring technology. At the same time, there has been little headway in developing domestic telecommunications products. Management of the industry is chaotic in the absence of clear regulations, and a multilayered bureaucracy encourages wasted resources, duplication, red tape, and corruption. Political problems are likely to emerge as telecommunications continues to help open Chinese society and young Chinese come to embrace Western industrial culture.

Nevertheless, China is destined to become and remain the world's "super market" as long as it remains politically stable in its transition from a plannned to a market economy. Telecommunications will continue to play a key role during this transition.