The creation of the new canton of Jura in 1979 required several referendums, first to separate it from the canton of Bern and then to allow parts of it to make their own arrangements, but it settled local unrest that had turned to violence.All this direct democracy is hard work for Swiss voters.
They were in the logistics-and-security business, but they also settled local land and tribal disputes.
Giving feasts, settling local disputes, and providing food for the poor were the duties of sheikhs, he explained.
But even police chiefs acknowledge the danger that informants could be settling local scores or setting traps.The third prong of the new strategy is tougher laws.
In the tribal areas just across the Pakistan border, moreover, Taliban adherents have begun carving out pockets of parallel rule, settling local disputes and beheading suspected informants.
It extorts "taxes" from businesses, pays for community projects, controls petty crime and settles local disputes.Mr Calderón dismissed the latest attacks as a "desperate" response to government pressure.
Another political institution that emerged shortly after the settlers arrived was the town meeting, which started as a forum for settling local quarrels and grew to what is in many smaller towns the community event of the year.
However, as the rebellion has gained ground, it has looked less like an effort to settle local scores and more like a plan to install Rwanda's friends at the helm of a buffer state in eastern Congo.
When not fighting leftist guerrillas or settling local disputes, the young men of the group -- "kids with guns," one elderly resident grumbles -- strut their stuff for local girls whose fecundity seems like a desperate bid to replace the dead.
Some people have turned to the Taliban to settle local disputes, in particular in parts of Helmand where they dominate, said the director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Kandahar, Abdul Qadar Noorzai.
Some of his policies, such as electing police sheriffs and using traditional tribal justice to settle local disputes, could go scarily wrong.Messiahs are not enough in Pakistan's electoral system, where elections are won constituency by constituency, and party machines are all.
