Perspectives on Fragile States

I would like to take a step back from linking fragile states to our [the western world] security. Searching for lists of fragile states I realized that a good number of these failed states would also show up on historical lists of being recipients of western intervention and aid. This is right back to this blog's namesake, Easterly's "White Man's Burden", since this is exactly the analysis that he performs on a number of countries.

So we have the situation where governments and/or other international bodies, such as the IMF, exerted external pressures on a government in order to get it to "shape up" and become just like the rest of the, fairly homogenous, western world. Then a few years down the road, when those pressures and expectations simply do not mesh well with the traditions and cultures of the country, we distance ourselves from the situation, wag our finger and say, "Woah, stay away from them, they are a fragile state. They're insecure, relating with them could be unsafe." (Who else sees the analogies to current socio-economic stratification between individual people here in North America?)

Encouraging internationally a generic form of government, which the US is so keen to do in the form of democracy, is exactly like imposing outside technology when doing development work. (On a side note, I just got news that my work from the past three years has unraveled even faster than I thought possible, which was already pretty fast.) So as aid agencies "discover" that local problems have local solutions, when are we going to make the jump to political institutions?

Please watch this four minute BBC interview with Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a former British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Israel. The last 30 seconds of this clip say it all... (apologies to those with slow internet.) In summary, Cowper-Coles says the key to a stable Middle East is to provide the youth with education and jobs as well as a representative government, not necessarily a Western liberal democracy.

Without promoting a no-government influence Tea-Party type perspective, I think we have to come to the realization that when trying to unnaturally influence and cajole extremely complex systems to move in a direction we feel at the time is the right direction, then the end result is often very undesirable, even in the rare instances when the system did move where we wanted. Science has begun to see this in ecological systems (an introduction of foreign species has unintended consequences), development studies are beginning to understand this (the real development or progress rarely results from the planned activities), and I think one could even find historical examples in the Roman empire or the Catholic church.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, this could even be the case for economic and political systems. We have yet to understand the full effects of all the bail-outs going on around the world whether it's GM in North America or Greece in Europe. Similarly, we simply have not learned from our history of trying to influence politics in Afghanistan and yet we still are sticking our noses in there. Just like unnaturally preventing forest fires annually resulted in massive, unpreventable fires every few years, falsely supporting or even toppling governments will continue to have some unintended consequences, including possibly making this world more insecure for the rest of us.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

ps. This is a fairly laissez-faire perspective. Ie, hands off, things will sort themselves out, which I tend NOT to agree with, I think there are a number of strong anti-laissez-faire examples from complex systems which I have not mentioned at all. Please, comment away!

Barbarian at the Gates?

Image copyright John MacDonald, published in Walt (1997).

They used to be ‘failed states’, now they are ‘fragile states’, a loosely bounded set of states that are “failing, or at risk of failing, with respect to authority, comprehensive service entitlements or legitimacy” (Stewart and Brown 2009:3). The debate about what exactly constitutes state fragility and which states are fragile is ongoing.  But my question here is: why, according to the people who matter in the development policy world, should we (citizens and policy-makers in rich countries) care about fragile states? Is it on the grounds of morality? After all, we’re told, a large percentage of the poorest people in the world live in these fragile places. Well, it seems not to be that simple.

According to DFID:  “In an interdependent world, insecurity can easily spread. Development agencies cannot ignore the impact that security threats at all levels – local, national and global – have on poor people. At the same time, the world community cannot ignore the critical role of poverty and inequality in increasing risks for us all. We need to ensure that, as an international community, we make progress on both security and development” (2005:8).

I will look more closely at the implications of linking development and security in my next post. Here, I want to point out that DFID is urging (itself, ostensibly) to do more and better in fragile states because “in an interdependent world, insecurity can easily spread”. Security, as a concept in development policy and literature, is rather hard to pin down, it’s poorly theorised.  Whose security are we really talking about? What does insecurity mean?  Here, however, it appears that insecurity is largely contained within fragile states, but there is a possibility of it spreading.  To where? To the country in which DFID is headquartered.  The fragile states literature attempts to explain the drivers of insecurity and instability in these states and to prescribe treatments for this disease.  And apparently we need a cure quickly, because we are closer than ever to the patient in this “interconnected world”.

Anderson sums up a common prescription for fragile states in this way: “Reforming governance arrangements to ensure that they ‘deliver’ is thus seen to have both curative and preventive power: good governance is the medicine needed to heal a fragile post-conflict state, an antidote that can prevent a fragile state from collapsing into violent conflict” (2008:12).

Fragile states are thus seen as isolated entities of malaise characterised by poor governance and lack of trust between government and citizens (Ghani and Lockhart 2008). Consequently, there is little or no attempt to look for causes of state fragility in global political economy systems and structures (Anderson 2008).

State fragility can create conditions for conflict and the spread of instability that may threaten rich donor countries.  But it troubles me that this is the justification that is being provided for providing aid to these countries.  It troubles me for two reasons.  First, this kind of justification highlights the incredibly uneven, politicised way in which aid has flowed to conflict-affected countries (think of Afghanistan or Pakistan pre and post-9/11).  Second, I find it difficult to believe that aid programs built around this theory and planned in rich donor countries will balance the two goals of securing the donor country and reducing poverty in the receiving country.  Furthermore, the apolitical explanations for state fragility provided by fragile states theories obscure many highly problematic and dysfunctional relationships between donor countries and conflict-affected countries, relationships that may, in fact, be fuelling these conflicts, or, at best, perpetuating them.

References:

Andersen, L. (2008) 'Fragile States on the International Agenda', Part I in Fragile Situations: Background papers, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen.

DFID (2005) Fighting poverty to build a safer world: a strategy for security and development, Department for International Development.

Ghani, A. & Lockhart, C. (2008) Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World, Oxford University Press, New York.

Stewart, F. & Brown, G. (2009) ‘Fragile States’, CRISE Working Paper No. 51, Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity, QEH, University of Oxford. 

Walt, S. (1997) ‘Building up New Bogeymen’, Foreign Policy, no. 106, pp. 176-189.

We're Back

Kurtis has completed two semesters and is into his third in Waterloo and I have completed two terms in Manchester and I’m now starting to work on my dissertation, due on September 5.

We’re both looking forward to getting stuck back into this blog and we hope we haven’t lost our faithful readers along the way.

Leaving our discussion of value frameworks for the moment (although I’m sure that topic will surface again in the posts to come) we will turn to the topic of my dissertation for 6 consecutive posts.  I will offer three posts and Kurtis will respond in a separate post to each of them.  Following those posts, we will shift focus to sustainability, particularly as it pertains to those of us living in OECD countries – those of us consuming –non-renewable resources faster than anyone else, at topic that Kurt is thinking and learning about.

I’m still fine-tuning the topic of my dissertation.  But roughly, I will attempt an analysis of a particular set of development projects ongoing along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. I will look at the project design, plans and implementation, especially in the context of the regional conflict and, in the broader context of the War on Terror and the current development category of fragile states.  In my next three posts, I will first introduce the concept of fragile states (look for that post tomorrow).  Then I will look at the securitisation of development with respect to fragile states theory.  Finally, I will look at theories of development planning in the context of fragile states.  Along the way I’ll offer my two cents on Osama bin Laden’s killing, Three Cups of Tea and Greg Mortenson and a topic on the tips of all your tongues: liberalism’s external sovereignty frontier.