Engaging Fragile States: Closing the Gap between Theory and Policy

David Carment is professor of international affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, and a fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI). Yiagadeesen Samy is an associate professor of international affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. The material in their paper is based on several years of research that the authors have conducted through the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy (CIFP) project (www.carleton.ca/cifp).¹

“Fragility” is not a term typically applied to countries as dissimilar as North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Honduras. Yet each, much like Tolstoy’s unhappy family, is fragile in its own unique way. Saudi Arabia ranks poorly in our basket of legitimacy standards, which includes measures of gender equity, political representation, human rights and the rule of law, as well as others. North Korea, in contrast, is a poor performer in political and social development, and Honduras is plagued by internal turmoil, gang-related violence and other internal challenges to its authority structures. A more typical selection of high-ranking fragile states might include the likes of Pakistan, Somalia and Haiti, and indeed, these are countries that suffer from weaknesses in multiple areas of economic, political and social performance and do in fact score highly in most rankings of fragility. (In such rankings, a high score or placing means, of course, that a country is a poor performer.)

Varieties of Fragility

In comparing these two sets of examples, we can see that some states more easily fit our notion of what we think a fragile state should be. There are, on the one hand, countries that have typically reached a terminus of complete collapse brought on by “man-made” calamity such as civil war or a mismanaged economy exacerbated by environmental degradation. These are states which, despite international efforts, are utterly incapable of managing their political and economic space. One such example is Haiti, which received close to US$9 billion in foreign aid between 1960 and 2008. Before the 2010 earthquake hit, Haiti was ranked 149th out of 182 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index, with more than 70 per cent of its population living on less than $2 a day. Its GDP per capita in 2008 of US$1,087 was roughly half of what it was in 1980, and life-expectancy was only sixty-one years.

In contrast to the perennially poorly performing Haiti, consider North Korea, a country ranked in the middle of the overall fragility index pack of the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy (CIFP). However, when its fragility is calculated solely on measures of legitimacy, the country does much worse. Given North Korea’s isolation, such a finding has a high level of intuitive appeal. With its low level of legitimacy, the “hermit kingdom” might be termed “brittle”—endowed with sufficient authority and capacity to maintain control of state borders and territory, but highly vulnerable to exogenous shocks.

In brief, what we have described here are two slightly different ways of understanding fragility. And for all our aspirations to greater specificity, we must recognise that the term “fragility” remains a heuristic—a way of capturing and integrating a number of distinct academic and policy interpretations in a somewhat more cohesive and coherent whole. More specifically, fragility can be understood as a composite measure of all aspects of state performance, producing a ranking that would be most closely associated with those countries that are typically “failed” at the top of the list. This would be a list that most policymakers and academics would recognise, and indeed, if one surveys the vast literature on fragility and the various rankings available, it is clear that such lists do not vary much in terms of which countries appear at the top.

Typically, thirty to fifty so-called “most fragile” states appear on these lists. Most are experiencing or have experienced large-scale violence, and most suffer from what we would call internal challenges to their authority structures. On the other hand, fragility is also an unfolding and ultimately indeterminate process associated with a subset of performance standards. Saudi Arabia may indeed rank poorly according to our legitimacy measures but it also scores much better in other core areas of state performance. While the former composite measure provides us with a general portrait of which countries might be considered strong or weak performers overall, the latter subset of measures provides us with specificity regarding key structural weaknesses.

More generally, the economic capacity problems that beset the fragile states of sub-Saharan Africa are distinct from the legitimacy and authority problems of the fragile states of Central and South Asia. In our country rankings, Pakistan and Sri Lanka exhibit poor performance on measures of authority and legitimacy, while middle performers in Africa such as Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania are faced with economic capacity problems. Those that show up repeatedly at the top of our rankings, that is, the worst performers, are those that face challenges in all three categories of authority, legitimacy and capacity (ALC).

The rest of our paper proceeds as follows. In the next section, we present the methodology we use to conceptualise fragility, as well as the different types of information—quantitative and qualitative—that are helpful for programming in fragile contexts. We then make a case for external intervention in fragile states, after which we discuss some of the challenges that result from intervention. We conclude with some recommendations.

Methodology

Our definition of fragility rests upon conceptualisations and measures that are relative. Some states may be strong by one measure and weak by others. We argue that the proper referents for understanding state fragility are not only a state’s own past, present and future performance in absolute terms but its performance relative to other states at any given point. The rate of change, which is understood by examining a state’s relative performance, as opposed to absolute performance, whether progressive or regressive, tells us whether a state is moving towards increasing fragility or whether its situation is improving. In other words, structural characteristics and measures of performance are useful for understanding state fragility only