Fragile States and Violence: The Limits of External Assistance

Lothar Brock is research director at the Peace Research Institute, Frankfurt, Germany; Hans-Henrik Holm is professor of international relations at the Danish School of Media and Journalism, Arhus, Denmark; Georg Sorensen is professor of international politics and economics at Arhus University, Denmark; Michael Stohl is a professor in the Department of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara.

It is often forgotten that the global system of sovereign states as we know it today emerged with the process of decolonisation that followed the Second World War. Advanced states with polities based on law, order, centralised democratic rule, developed economies, and defined nations (i.e., groups of people making up a legal, cultural and emotional community) developed to full maturity only in the twentieth century, the result of a process that began more than five hundred years ago in Europe.

A Different Kind of State

The path taken to modern, effective, democratic and economically robust statehood in Europe and North America has not been replicated by many Third World countries, even though these have adopted the formal characteristics of sovereign statehood. In these countries, a different kind of “state formation” has taken place and this has often led to the emergence of what we may label “fragile states”. Such states tend to be dominated by social forces and political groups which are not interested in effective state formation or in development and modernity as defined in the West. Rather, they are interested in using the language of modernity and the nation-state to secure and maintain power within those states for the benefits that such control can bring them rather than the state itself. In consolidated states, self-seeking elites were eventually controlled by the people. Such control has not materialised in most of the fragile states.

Weak statehood is not identical with anarchy. New research shows that weak statehood is often compensated for by strong societies. Nevertheless, in comparison with the modern Weberian state, fragile states are characterised by serious deficiencies in three areas: (a) government; (b) economy; and (c) nationhood. The consequences of these deficiencies include high levels of internal violence and economic inequity, if not misery, which should not be romanticised as cultural heritage. The lives of the people that reside within such states are poor, nasty, brutish and short (but, with all deference to Thomas Hobbes, not necessarily solitary).

While there are differences in how individual states emerge or become fragile, weak states have experienced a process of state formation qualitatively different from that of the consolidated states of Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Many fragile states are riven with violence. Although there is considerable variation in the particular patterns and causes of violence within these states, a key common factor is the presence of powerful self-seeking elites which may actually profit from state fragility in two ways: first, by embracing state fragility as a practice of striking deals with domestic contenders; second by using it as an incentive for aid-donors to provide external funds. Effective state-building would complicate these ways of controlling the state as a source of revenue. So these elites are not particularly interested in effective state-building.

Furthermore, leaders of fragile states do not face a nation, a united group of people; they face a strongly segmented population, split along ethnic, tribal and religious lines. Their nearest supporters look for immediate payoffs. On the other hand, state elites face strong external interests (other states) or groups (such as multinational companies) whose demands may have little to do with effective state-making but on the contrary may exploit the situation to their own advantage. Thus, the international community bears considerable responsibility with regard to fragile statehood.

In what follows we argue that there are no easy solutions to the problem of fragile states in general or to that of the violence within them in particular. We contend that neither large-scale military interventions nor short-term infusions of money, changes in trading relations, or the mitigation of a current conflict suffice to alter the fundamental problems that characterise such states. The international community may be able to improve the external framework conditions and may even on occasion have the capacity to intervene to assist populations under severe duress and provide the “space” for these changes to occur, but it is the people and governments of fragile states who will need to bear the primary responsibility for any improvement within these states. And therein lies the basic conundrum. Fragile states are dependent upon solutions provided by elites which exploit the state for their own narrow personal benefit and to the detriment of the majority of the population who themselves get very little and expect only the worst from the state. Thus, even under the best of conditions, the mitigation of fragile statehood by outsiders will be difficult to achieve, not least because outsiders may be ill-adapted to the domestic traditions of providing public goods.

Major Characteristics of Fragile States

The world of states is full of diversity, and this is also the case when it comes to fragile states. Some, such as Somalia, have been described as a “collapsed” state, in the sense that the state apparatus has ceased to exist for more than a decade. Some states are weak in terms of formal institutional capacity (e.g., Chad), but others that are fragile, such as Colombia, are not weak in this sense. Some states, such as Iraq, Sudan, Liberia and Sierra Leone, have been war-torn for long periods and their institutional capacity has been destroyed, but this is not true of other fragile states, such as Bangladesh and North Korea.

We begin with the state in the narrow sense: the government and the state apparatus. Institutional and administrative structures in fragile states are typically inefficient and corrupt. Rule is based on negotiation and coercion rather than positive law. There are no effective mechanisms for holding leaders accountable to their peoples. Max Weber famously defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”. In this regard, the