Posted on July 29, 2015.
From The Center for Strategic and International Studies
Rethinking Engagement in Fragile States
Jennifer G. Cooke and Richard Downie
Introduction
The concept of “fragile states” has been the subject of an expanding body of scholarly literature and the target of considerable bilateral and multilateral intervention and assistance. The concept gained traction in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as policymakers looked toward what were termed “ungoverned” or “under-governed” regions as potential incubators and havens for violent extremism and terror networks. The reasons for attention have broadened over time. Instability in fragile states is a frequent source of conflict and humanitarian crisis within countries, a driver of displacement and massive refugee flows, and often a threat to the stability and security of neighboring states. Economies in fragile states often underperform, their societies are divided, and their people suffer poor developmental and economic outcomes. Fragile states are home to nearly half the world’s population living in absolute poverty.1
These problems demand a response from the international donor community, and indeed they have been a big focus of foreign policy attention, diplomatic effort, security interventions, and development dollars. The results of these efforts, however, have been decidedly mixed. Part of the problem is that diagnosing “fragility” in a particular context can be difficult, and the diversity and peculiarities of states deemed fragile means that there can be no easy template of responses to help guide interventions and translate “lessons learned” from one context to another. Donors often lack sufficient understanding of the fragile states in which they work; as a result, they have focused on the manifestations of fragility rather than the structural vulnerabilities that drive fragility, which are shaped by history, geography, culture, and power dynamics that are more difficult to capture in indices and quantitative analyses.
The tendency has been to focus on the formal institutions and processes of the state— constitutions, elections, technical capacity, tasks that lend themselves more easily to metrics, and to the tools of analysis and intervention most readily available to donors. Much more difficult to get at are the political economy dynamics and the social divisions that almost always accompany state fragility and are often the reason for state weakness. Finally, there can be no technical fixes to fragile states, and forging a social compact, a collective sense of nationhood, and resilient institutions is the work of many generations, and a process in which external players can only play a small part. Donor states need to be realistic about what they can achieve in “state-building” efforts and be clear-eyed in their priorities and long-term commitment to addressing fragility.
In the last year, CSIS has held a series of workshops and public meetings examining the challenges of fragility in four states categorized as fragile: Mali, Myanmar, Somalia, and South Sudan. The aim was to examine each of these cases individually, and to better understand the opportunities—and limitations—of external intervention. Despite the diversity of these countries, common themes and recommendations for external engagement emerged across the discussions:
- Diversify partners beyond central government institutions
- Better map and understand informal structures of authority and interaction
- Increase emphasis on and strengthen social cohesion
- Encourage a “venture capital” approach to interventions
- Start gradually and scale up; not the reverseConceptual ChallengesThe problems of dealing with state fragility begin at the conceptual stage, and the categorization of fragile states raises some questions about its utility as an analytical framework. There is little consensus on what is meant by state fragility, and competing definitions cover an extremely broad set of indicators and states. These four definitions, from institutions and individuals working on fragile states, illustrate the lack of consensus:
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has moved away from the “fragile state” nomenclature to focusing on “states of fragility.” Its 2015 report on the subject describes five dimensions for measuring fragility: violence; access to justice for all; effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions; economic foundations; and capacity to adapt to social, economic, and environmental shocks and disasters.2
The African Development Bank likewise describes “situations of fragility” and opts for a more straightforward definition, describing fragility as: “A condition of elevated risk of institutional breakdown, societal collapse or violent conflict.”3
For the International Monetary Fund, fragile states are “states in which the government is unable to deliver basic services and security to the population.”4
Political scientist Seth Kaplan adds the important dimension of social cohesion/fragmentation to the mix: “A state’s ability to navigate its challenges is chiefly determined by two factors: the capacity of its population to cooperate and the ability of its institutions (formal and informal) to channel this cooperation to meet national challenges. . . . Fragile states are deficient in both areas.”5
Partly because of the lack of consensus on definitions, diagnosing fragile states is difficult. It is hard to separate out genuine fragility from moments of fragility. And it is likewise difficult to distinguish root causes of fragility from drivers or manifestations of fragility. These problems make it difficult to agree on which states are fragile and anticipate which ones are likely to become fragile. The various indices of state fragility produced by institutions such as the Fund for Peace and World Bank have merit as analytic exercises, but they agree on little and have limited predictive value.6 The data they use offer some clues but do not capture important ways of measuring stability in a state, such as the degree of social cohesion and the nature of intergroup grievances. This would require the use of qualitative data that is not factored into these indices. It is hard to derive much meaning from the 2015 Fragile States Survey when it places such a diverse set of states as Russia, Tanzania, and Angola in a single category (High Warning) and equally difficult to distinguish between categories such as ‘Alert,’ ‘High Alert,’ and ‘Very High Alert.’ The OECD report puts Angola and Liberia in the same basket. Ethiopia and Somalia are paired in another (a grouping to which both countries would likely take offense).
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that state fragility is something of a catch-all category for countries that have little in common other than being troubled. The case studies examined in this report illustrate this diversity. South Sudan, a country in which there is little sense of shared nationhood and where state institutions are barely nascent, collapsed into civil war almost immediately after achieving independence. Somalia is fragmented into autonomous or semiautonomous statelets whose people are
RETHINKING ENGAGEMENT IN FRAGILE STATES |3
homogenous in terms of ethnicity and religion but nonetheless deeply divided, with wildly divergent views about the type of state they want to live under. Mali is a weak state with limited ability to provide public goods—including security—to its people, but at the same time a place where there is a fairly strong sense of national identity shared by most groups, apart from an aggrieved minority, the Tuareg. Myanmar is a fairly strong, authoritarian state undergoing an uncertain, incomplete political transition while continuing to oppress groups it does not recognize as its own citizens.
From Muddled Concepts to Muddled Policy
Given these conceptual problems it is not surprising that donors have struggled to come up with effective solutions to fragile states. Among the biggest oversights has been to underplay the importance of the political economy. Fragility is not a purely technical problem that can be fixed by applying procedural solutions such as passing new constitutions, improving tax collection, and reforming public financial management. It usually involves political and societal deficiencies in the way people are governed, how they relate to each other, and how they understand their roles and responsibilities within the nation state.
In addition, fragile states tend not to operate in the way that donor governments are familiar with. Authority is often exercised outside formal institutions but donor governments are not used to thinking in this way and find it uncomfortable to engage with informal economies, power structures, and networks. Recipient states may also strongly object to external governments or NGOs bypassing the central authorities, thus limiting the scope of movement and interaction. As a result, donors, usually under intense pressure to respond quickly, will often have a limited understanding of the societies in which they work, which can lead to misdiagnosing their problems, choosing the wrong partners, and implementing programs that have little or no positive impact.
In order to avoid these problems, donor governments must make more effort to understand the countries they work in, over a longer period of time. Reactive analysis that takes place in a hurry, usually in the middle of a crisis, is less useful than a more considered approach. Embassies should be doing this mapping exercise in a more systematic way, reaching beyond the circuit of political elites and urban-based civil society groups to talk to a far broader set of interlocutors and analysts. Government officials and elites in the capital city can only provide a partial picture and are often disconnected from what is happening in the wider country. There are many examples of donor nations failing to discern the direction of events because of their reliance on a small circle of informants or their failure to make long-term investments in understanding their host countries. The United States and its European partners were reluctant to abandon the notion that Mali was a model democracy in a region where there were few other success stories to hold on to. The 2012 coup d’état caught them off- guard. In South Sudan, donors appeared almost willfully blind to the rapid degeneration of the country in the aftermath of independence, unable to confront the failures of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) as a partner and unwilling to change direction as their development money continued to be wasted. In Somalia, the United States disengaged for more than a decade following the Black Hawk Down debacle of 1993. When it returned, it was too quick to pounce on the threat posed by the Islamic Courts Union (thanks in part to poor advice from its self-interested ally, Ethiopia) rather than credit its progress in forging the beginnings of a social contract with communities in Mogadishu.
One area that deserves more attention from donors is the need to cement horizontal links between self-identifying groups in society—whether ethnic, religious, regional, cultural, or socioeconomic—and strengthen their sense of collective nationhood. In many fragile states, population groups are highly fragmented and people lack a strong sense of national identity. Citizens need to want to live in the same state together, yet most donor efforts focus on building the social contract between the government and its people rather than the social contract between citizens.
Finally, current approaches to fragility tend to focus on the central state—in places where a major problem is often the over-centralization of state power. People living in peripheral regions often view the central government with deep suspicion, and these suspicions can quickly extend to donors if they are perceived as working too closely with authorities at the national level. Further, by limiting their interlocutors to a small set of government players, often with an overreliance on particular individuals deemed trustworthy, donors lose leverage and partner governments lose incentive for inclusivity or reform. Donors need to look below the national level, particularly in countries where the central government lacks legitimacy among sections of the public. International efforts in Somalia have been dogged for years by perceptions that they have narrowly focused on national transitional governments that have had little public legitimacy, questionable authority, and limited territorial control. By contrast, donors are sometimes slow to identify subnational governance and peace-building initiatives that are working and even slower to support them. In Somalia, the U.S. government tried to correct this oversight by adopting a twin-track approach, diversifying its support toward some of the most promising federal entities such as Somaliland and Puntland. But this approach soon faltered, and the Transitional Federal Government maintained its perceived status as “the only game in town” with a guaranteed flow of foreign funding.
In summary, donor engagement with fragile states must be broader, involving deep analysis conducted over a longer period of time and engaging with a wider set of stakeholders in the informal and the subnational arenas as well as the formal, national levels.