At the start of the summer, I was pretty skeptical about the kind of policy impact you could have from a think tank. Do policymakers even read the lengthy reports published by think tanks?

As I entered Stanford, I decided that my bulk of my research would cover the activities of the European Union in the South Caucasus. Specifically, I am interested in understanding what role that instruments like the Eastern Partnership and the bilateral treaties between the EU and Armenia and Georgia have on economic development.

This past summer, then, as I interned at the World Justice Project and spent every day studying rule of law issues around the world, the particular ways that the rule of law is talked about in the United States stood out to me as somewhat strange. For fun, I tried a little experiment — if you google any major US politician and the phrase “rule of law”, you are probably going to find a quote where they claim to support it.