Constructing the obscure object of a ‘fragile state’

The discourse on state fragility emerged in the early 1990s, and Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner’s article ‘Saving failed states’ is a conventional starting point (Helman and Ratner, 1992; see also Jackson, 1991). Their language is of ‘failure’ not fragility, and they paint a gloomy picture of near anarchy in places such as the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sudan, Haiti and Cambodia, characterized by warfare, violence and civil strife, economic breakdown, human rights violations and cross-border refugee flows. Others focused on ‘state collapse’ – conceptualized as a near total breakdown of state institutions, and included cases such as war-torn Liberia, Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo and Chad (Zartman, 1995).

Such language provided a shared framework to facilitate collective action, and were part and parcel of great power (and imperial) global governance mechanisms and ordering principles (Müller et al, 2022). This is clearly the case for the language of state fragility, and highlights that there is little new in such global ordering practices; as noted by Branwen Gruffydd Jones (2013: 49), ‘the discourse must be recognized as a contemporary successor to a much longer genealogy of imperial discourse about Africa and other non-European societies’.

Hence the crux of Helman and Ratner’s argument was not purely descriptive – both were former US State Department officials – and they were making a direct plea for active engagement and intervention to ‘save’ these states (and presumably their populations) from anarchy and its associated ills, via ‘conservatorship’ – a ‘form of guardianship or trusteeship’ (Helman and Ratner, 1992: 12). They also linked state failure to the emerging concept (in the UN Secretary-General’s Agenda for Peace) of post-conflict peacebuilding – a linkage that proved fruitful for a variety of actors promoting a new interventionist role for the international community. Helman and Ratner should not be seen as catalysts though, but rather as having captured the post-Cold War liberal zeitgeist, exemplified by several other geopolitical interventions: President George H.W. Bush’s ‘new world order’, pronounced after the liberation of Kuwait from the 1991 Iraqi invasion by a broad international coalition, and more sombrely, Robert Kaplan’s ‘The Coming Anarchy’ or Susan Woodward’s (1995) Balkan Tragedy. By Kaplan’s account, the world was facing the ‘withering away of the central governments of modern states in favour of tribal domains, “city-states, shanty-states, [and] nebulous and anarchic regionalisms”’ (Kaplan, 1994: 24, cited in Milliken and Krause, 2002: 753), all subsequent (if overdramatized) characterizations of fragile and failed states.

Analysing state failure very quickly moved beyond a purely intellectual or conceptual exercise. In 1994 the CIA, at the behest of the White House (in particular Vice President Al Gore), sponsored a large-scale open-source research project called the ‘State Failure Task Force’, intended to uncover the correlates of state failure and – more significantly – ‘to develop a methodology that would identify key factors and critical thresholds signalling a high risk of crisis in countries some two years in advance’ (Etsy et al, 1995: iii). Hence the discourse of state fragility was in essence policy-driven, with the objective of facilitating American decision makers’ preparations for different forms of intervention in the post-Cold War world. In the aftermath of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Rwanda genocide, the goal was also to potentially provide some early warning of such things as mass killings and ethnic cleansing.¹ There is little doubt that the investments in data collection and analysis were policy-driven, emerging in a world in which large-scale data collection efforts and analysis were becoming more prominent and easier.² The American government was also not alone, however, and, as noted by Susan Woodward, by the mid-1990s ‘the concept had, in fact, become a dominant conceptual framework for foreign economic and security policies in much of the North’, including for the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), UN agencies, the World Bank and USAID (Woodward, 2017: 2).

By her account, the concept of a failed state is an ideology; a set of beliefs that ‘provides shared meaning and enables social action’ (Woodward, 2017: 3). Or, as succinctly noted by Sonja Grimm and colleagues (2014), fragile states are a political invention. That the concept of fragile states is an ideology and political construct can be taken as a given. What is more important, however, is how it works as an ideology or conceptual construct with claims to authoritative knowledge on which decision makers should act. As will be discussed later, it largely places responsibility for ‘failure’ on local governments and national elites, ignores broader structural and historical forces, justifies external intervention, and partakes of a ‘colonialist nostalgia’ expressed in calls for international administration (such as was implemented in Kosovo and Timor Leste) (Richardson, 1996; Richmond and Franks, 2008).

What this chapter is interested in, echoing Bueger (Chapter 6, this volume) are the ways in which the concept may contribute to the construction and framing of complex geopolitical problems, how its construction differs among powerful international actors, and the way in which different constructions of fragility, while sharing a common language, facilitate and make possible certain forms of action (and render other forms impossible). The focus is not so much on the justificatory framework that state fragility offers for forms of radical (military) intervention by major powers in places such as Afghanistan, but rather the attempt to formalize and structure the more mundane ‘everyday practices’ of intervention such as foreign assistance and lending, development, and security programming in such areas as public management, reform and governance of the security sector, democracy promotion and human rights and rule of law.

The most generic definition of fragility would be ‘States that are failing, or at risk of failing, with respect to authority, comprehensive basic service provision, or legitimacy’ (Stewart and Brown, 2010: 9). But before unpacking this, one should ask: what, conceptually, does fragility mean and what are its entailments? What ‘causes’ fragility, what are its characteristics, and what are the consequences of being in a state of fragility? Although Woodward concludes that the concept is essentially meaningless empirically, conceptually and practically, the term means something to those who use it, and such meaning often reflects a concept’s use in other domains. Much like notions such as ‘resilience’ or ‘proliferation’, fragility is a concept imported from another domain, not an intrinsic property of a social system or a state, and this importation comes with ‘everyday resonances’ for people who use the term. In particular, it applies to everyday objects (glass, especially, which is easily subject to breakage as a result of an external shock), as well as to such things as ecosystems, medical conditions, financial systems, and so on. In everyday use an object can be intrinsically fragile, without one having to question how such fragility came about, and the consequences are fairly self-evident.

In environmental studies, by contrast, ecological fragility (which is a feature of all ecosystems), is understood as ‘the degree of sensitivity of habitats, communities and species to environmental change … involv[ing] a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors’ (Nilsson and Grelsson, 1995: 678). Noteworthy here are two things: first, external disturbances are considered co-equal to internal ones and second, fragility is not just a descriptive characteristic, but also the result of an often complex causal chain. In medicine, fragility involves ‘a chronic physical condition which results in a prolonged dependency on medical care’ (Law Insider, 2023), connoting both an enduring (chronic) condition that is unlikely to change, and reliance on outside intervention to sustain quality of life. In both of these cases, fragility is not a condition that is easily addressed or ‘cured’, and it may in fact lead either to total collapse or to a sustained situation of dependence. As will be noted later, the application of the concept of fragility to states draws upon some of these entailments while occluding others, in its ahistorical focus on internal state–society relations (legitimacy, authority, security) and descriptive statistics (indices or checklists) rather than an analysis of historical conditions and causal relationships that might create fragility, underpin it or render it intractable. Likewise, the consequences of fragility are seldom spelled out – or rather are part of the description of the phenomenon itself.

Like many terms with metaphoric entailments, the concept of fragility transmutes somewhat as it is translated, while retaining a shared conceptual core. In French, it appears to describe two very different situations: ‘[S]oit l’État fragile est en situation de crise politico-sécuritaire (anarchie, guerre civile, absence totale de contrôle de l’État), soit l’État fragile a une faible gouvernance’ (Castellanet et al, 2010).³ A politico-security crisis is a rather occasional event and does not necessarily entail the effacement of stateness or government (perhaps on part of a territory); while weak governance is more of a chronic condition as noted earlier. In German, the predominant usage was influenced both by the prevailing Anglophone discourse, and by a large-scale academic project on ‘Governance in Räumen begrenzter Staatlichkeit’ (governance in areas of limited statehood), which focused on the functional dimension of state fragility, including public goods or service delivery issues such as security, health, human rights and education (see Lindemann, 2014; Draude et al, 2018).

Similarly, fragility does not exist without its opposite, which in contemporary international development circles is often labelled ‘resilience’. Here too, the metaphorical entailments are important: resilience is an internal quality of resistance in an object or individual against external shocks, and the objective of strengthening resilience takes for granted that the conditions creating fragility or vulnerability are exogenous and immutable. A focus on building individuals’ resilience tends to occlude the root causes or forces that cause vulnerability (such as violence, inequality, lack of opportunity, poverty, exclusion) (Jütersonke and Kartas, 2012; Neocleous, 2013). Both cases require each other to exist, and resonate with more widely held everyday understandings and, one can argue, individualist ontologies of action and agency.

Creating the object

This section will explore the ‘similarities and differences between objects’ in an effort to unpack how knowledge of fragility is produced in the four different sites outlined earlier, in order to tease out the logic of statecraft and governance that it reflects or instantiates. It will first examine the data-production process (insofar as this is publicly accessible) to highlight the different ways in which such indices construct fragility. Later it will compare and contrast the four fragility frameworks to tease out their differences, and the possible implications of these. As a foretaste: the general orientation of all indices of state fragility is anchored in a liberal governmentality, with some variations as regards the nature of the state, state–society relations, and political economy, depending on the primary actor involved. What is perhaps more puzzling, however, is the shifting nature of the ordering involved in defining and identifying fragile states – which either implies a radical uncertainty about the category and concept, or (more positively) a progressive ‘refinement’ in order to maximize its political and practical utility. Finally, states subject to being classified as fragile seem (not surprisingly) often reluctant to embrace the label, even if it may bring some financial or economic benefits.

Comparing and contrasting fragility frameworks

State fragility is a constructed concept – which is neither surprising nor problematic – but is it a completely ad hoc concept, in a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland ‘words mean what I choose them to mean’ way? Although there has been considerable convergence around a common terminology, with some actors (the FSI) abandoning the term ‘failed states’ and its cognates (ungoverned spaces, weak, failing, collapsed, vulnerable, quasi-states, and so on) and others (the World Bank) moving towards a shared concept of fragility, different actors use the same term, but not with any particular effort to do so in the same or a similar way. Very few compare and contrast their rankings or categorizations, let alone potentially harmonize these. Table 7.1 gives some idea of the uncertainty (and areas of convergence) around the concept and ordering function of ‘fragile states’.

Only ten of the states appear on all four lists, with a further 14 states appearing on three of the four lists. That suggests considerable convergence despite definitional differences, and implies that it does not seem to matter a great deal what particular measurement or weighting strategy is followed. The absence of major divergences would also seem to reflect confirmation bias: we implicitly know fragility (and its absence) when we see it, and data analysis confirms our (great powers, donors) intuitions. At least five other things are noteworthy. First, only 12 of the 20 states that self-identify as fragile (in the G7+ initiative) appear on three or four lists – leaving almost half that seem to identify as fragile for ‘other’ reasons than recognized indicators. Togo, Timor Leste and Sierra Leone appear on no other fragility lists; Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea on only one other list (leaving aside the other three very small states). Second, those fragile states that appear on all lists except the self-identified G7+ Initiative list include such international pariahs or ‘difficult cases’ as Venezuela, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Syria and Libya (among others), suggesting that one’s ability to resist being drawn into the fragility donor orbit depends on relative power positions or the desirability of accessing donor resources.

Third, there are some significant plausible omissions from these lists. While I cannot justify these examples empirically at this point, one could plausibly ask why states such as Mexico, Hungary, Serbia or Moldova should not appear higher up the list, given, for example, their low rankings on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, low V-Dem democracy scores, and other evidence of weak or poor governance (Coppedge and Gerring, 2022; Transparency International, 2022). Arguably, fragility indices, despite their conceptual entailments of ‘brittleness’ do not adequately take into account the often brittle nature of political institutions and delivery of public goods in many Western or Northern states. Fourth, although the snapshot presentation does not track fragility indices over time, there is a great deal of stability in the overall rankings (with some noteworthy exceptions mainly related to the outbreak or termination of violent conflict). This suggests that fragility is more of a chronic condition, resistant to short-term ‘fixes’ such as aid allocations or international interventions. Finally, there appear to be two competing visions of fragility at work here: one which a strong domestic constituency is willing to acknowledge and (potentially) address, and one associated with authoritarian or fractured polities in which engagement with the international community is extremely limited or fraught. The latter, in particular, would appear to reject the reformist and interventionist agenda associated with fragility, and would otherwise (like Myanmar or Zimbabwe) potentially be considered ‘strong’ states not susceptible to disruptive shocks. In this case, ‘strong’ states are those in which the institutional presence is strong enough to suppress dissent, maintain regime control and resist external pressure – all of which would seem to be the opposite of ‘fragile’ and connote actual state resilience.

Conclusion

What do fragility comparisons and conceptualizations do? How do they constitute the socio-political world; what do they highlight and obscure, and how are they used by selected actors? Beginning at the beginning, state failure was clearly constructed as a security threat – as noted by Ratner and Helman or Robert Kaplan, ideas of state collapse, the ‘coming anarchy’ and ungoverned spaces all informed the reorientation of post-Cold War security policies in the global West around so-called new threats emanating from the Global South. In particular, these threats were regarded as internally generated, based on the inability of the state to provide public goods or meet basic needs – in particular security – with spillover effects for regional and international order and stability. This marked a rupture with traditional conceptions of insecurity oriented around the external capacity of a state to pose a military threat to its neighbours or beyond, and provided an interventionary blueprint for great power and multilateral governance.

But fragility comparisons were not only crucial to the construction and promotion of a particular governance object; the comparative practices of different institutions also had distributional consequences. One of the main ideas behind the OECD-DAC fragility report, as well as the G7+ initiative (and the policy frameworks that they supported), was to shift the way in which bilateral donor assistance was allocated, both in how development assistance was spent and in where it was allocated. Switzerland, for example, notes that ‘around half of the countries and regions in which Switzerland is actively involved qualify as fragile’ (SDC, 2022). The UK Department for International Development (as it was then called), under Claire Short, pushed very hard to include security sector reform as a development concern, and security (understood broadly) as a precondition for sustainable development achievements. And many donors, recognizing the specificities of working in fragile contexts, committed to working differently, rather than ‘development assistance as usual’. The politics of comparisons were anything but neutral data-driven or statistical exercises.

Much of this work was developed and promoted through the OECD’s International Network on Conflict and Fragility, which brought together key players from all major donors to develop guidance notes, lessons learned and best practice strategies to tackle fragility, as a means of influencing bilateral ODA practices (OECD, 2022). The list of publications gives a clear idea of what kinds of issues donors converged around: security, justice and rule of law, violent conflict and armed violence, and so on. Similarly, the World Bank’s ‘classification aims to inform strategic and operational decision-making within the World Bank Group [WBG]’ (World Bank, 2022a: 1) in order to ensure that ‘the WBG’s strategic and programmatic focus in countries affected by FCS [fragile and conflict-affected situations]-related issues is adapted and tailored to the diverse challenges faced by these countries’ (World Bank, 2022a: 1).⁷ The main driver here has been the work of the Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) Group, part of the social development dimension of the Bank’s organizational structure.

Although it is impossible in the scope of this chapter to trace shifts in donor allocations and practices, and to attribute them to fragility classifications, it appears that the politics of state fragility and donor assistance revolve more around the classification of a state as fragile (and hence warranting particular attention), and less around comparative rankings determining which states are more or less fragile, and in which dimensions, and how this may have changed over time (Carment et al, 2008). For example, although insecurity (conflict, violence, weak state institutions) is a key component of all conceptualizations of fragility, only 13 per cent of aid allocated in 2018 went to ‘peace-related objectives, including peacebuilding, basic safety and security, governance and inclusive political processes’ (Desai, 2020: 61). Since politics broadly defined is central to fragility, the relatively low attention paid to issues such as legitimacy, political institutions or service delivery suggests a disconnect between diagnosis and treatment. Aid allocations themselves are also determined by a host of considerations, including geopolitical or historical (colonial considerations), trends in donor countries and idiosyncratic factors.

With respect to the FSI, the most high-profile use is the league table of country rankings, although the developers of the Index stress that its main purpose is not a cross-sectional, but rather a longitudinal analysis of trends within states on different dimensions. The stated goals include conflict mitigation, early warning and risk analysis, all designed to inform decision making. Given the private nature of much of its work (which includes contextual risk assessments, responsible business practices, but also prevention of election violence and violence against women and girls), however, it is difficult to determine the balance between these three, and a perusal of the project’s website suggests it is targeted mainly towards corporate clients or local actors/NGOs (FFP, no date). It would be interesting to see to what extent the FSI rankings shape any private actors’ risk and investment decisions, but the available evidence suggests that trend analysis – whether based on the FSI, or shifts in the OECD and World Bank rankings over time – do not actually figure strongly in security policies, although, as states migrate ‘out’ of fragility, this may affect donor aid allocations. That the ‘security logic’ behind fragility is more sticky is perhaps not surprising (in contrast, for example, to Myatt and Müller’s analysis of cybersecurity, Chapter 9, this volume), given the very general and abstract way in which fragility is often conceived.

In short, the deployment of the language of fragility has not been a neutral and objective descriptor of particular phenomena in the world. It facilitated and accelerated the fusion of security and development concerns, and the ‘securitization’ of development assistance thus displaced traditional ideas of poverty reduction or sustainable development. It also has reoriented development assistance to ‘different’ destination countries – potentially also moving away from provision for basic needs and working with the world’s poorest or ‘bottom billion’ to more closely align to geopolitically sensitive contexts: states and regions regarded as posing a potential threat to Western or Northern interests or requiring sustained military interventions and commitments (Afghanistan, the Sahel, and so on). And it may also have changed (somewhat) the way in which development assistance is delivered, including through long-term engagements in fragile states, flexibility in programming, acceptance of risk of failure, and sensitivity to the negative distributional effects of large-scale development assistance projects, many of which exacerbate societal cleavages and inequalities, or enrich particular rent-seeking elites. Finally, it has doubtless prioritized a neoliberal form of governance, not only in the (mostly positive) sense of promoting inclusion, accountability and representative rule, but also in the liberal governmentality of the techniques of new public management (log frames, theories of change, output, outcome and impact indicators in programme monitoring and evaluation, and so on) to (re)engineer state institutions around the world.