ABSTRACT
The issues of structure and agency at first glance have a rather abstract relationship to ideas of political development. Yet these issues are fundamental to how one understands the competing forces that shape political processes and, consequently, how one chooses to act and upon what grounds. Despite the claims of some political theorists, it is not possible to establish a single rule or theoretical model that adequately explains all conditions that might prevail, what the available options might be or how people might react to them in their many and varied ways. That is to say, despite the claims to, neatness of, and preference for “grand uniting theories,” none are in fact universally applicable. The countervailing tendency in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been towards more specific and local theorizing.
