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Orthodox theorists assume that security and justice, as well as other essential services should be provided by modern state and private institutions in Late Developing Countries, but they provide very inadequate cover in most weal states and almost none in fragile or conflict states where local communities need to rely on often reinvented 'traditional' institutions to maintain order and create livelihoods. These coexist and interact in complex and often contradictory ways with modern institutions creating dualistic societies whose institutional arrangements and evolu-tionary processes can only be understood by developing a theoretical apparatus that not only obliges us to identify the principles that govern both modern and traditional systems, but also the way in which they co-exist and co-evolve together to produce unique hybrid solutions and developmental trajectories. We show how this approach al-lows us to develop a convincing historically based analysis of the problems involved in creating political order in weak states, and show how Malinowski's 'three column anthropology' (1945/61) provides us with a powerful analyt-ical tool when we do so.

International aid plays an ambivalent and contested role in stabilising the global system. It creates asym-metrical relationships between donors and recipients that succeed when their interests can be can harmo-nised but not when they conflict. Donors use their support to persuade sovereign governments to adopt pol-icies they support but cannot always negotiate acceptable settlements with them, producing non-compliance and failed programmes. These relationships and strategies have changed radically since the war in response to changes in the global system, policy paradigms, and crises. We review these processes, treat-ing aid relationships as a structural component of the global system; review the different strategies adopted by donors since the war that culminated in the recent Paris Declaration and Sustainable Development Goals calling for poverty reduction and good governance. We identify the political challenges that donors con-front in addressing these issues, and examine the strengths and weaknesses of their attempts to use of Polit-ical Economy Analysis and New Public Management to address them.