The Political Invention of Fragile States

The Power of Ideas

Sonja Grimm, Nicolas Lemay-Hebert, Olivier Nay

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317625445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates the emergence, the dissemination and the reception of the notion of 'state fragility'. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the 'fragile states' concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. Contributors investigate the instrumental use of the 'state fragility' label in the legitimisation of Western policy interventions in countries facing violence and profound poverty. They also emphasise the agency of actors 'on the receiving end', describing how the elites and governments in so-called 'fragile states' have incorporated and reinterpreted the concept to fit their own political agendas. A first set of articles examines the role played by the World Bank, the OECD, the European Union and the G7+ in the transnational diffusion of the concept, which is understood as a critical element in the new discourse on international aid and security. A second set of papers employs three case studies (Sudan, Indonesia and Uganda) to explore the processes of appropriation, reinterpretation and the strategic use of the 'fragile state' concept.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

‘Fragile States’: introducing a political concept

Sonja Grimma, Nicolas Lemay-Hébertb and Olivier Nayc

aDepartment of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany; bDepartment of International Development, University of Birmingham, UK; cDepartment of Political Science, Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France

The special issue ‘Fragile States: A Political Concept’ investigates the emergence, dissemination and reception of the notion of ‘state fragility’. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the ‘fragile states’ concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. The contributors to the issue investigate the instrumental use of the ‘state fragility’ label in the legitimisation of Western policy interventions in countries facing violence and profound poverty. They also emphasise the agency of actors ‘on the receiving end’, describing how the elites and governments in so-called ‘fragile states’ have incorporated and reinterpreted the concept to fit their own political agendas. A first set of articles examines the role played by the World Bank, the OECD, the European Union and the g7+ coalition of ‘fragile states’ in the transnational diffusion of the concept, which is understood as a critical element in the new discourse on international aid and security. A second set of papers employs three case studies (Sudan, Indonesia and Uganda) to explore the processes of appropriation, reinterpretation and the strategic use of the ‘fragile state’ concept.

Introduction

The terminology ‘fragile states’ should only be used with caution […] I strongly feel that it is not a neutral terminology. Apart from the emotional implications, it has financial and political implications. Moreover, it gives us a bad image in the eyes of the investors we so badly need. (Address by Pierre Nkurunziza, President of Burundi, to the United Nations General Assembly, March 2009)

The capacity to shape the representation of reality is now commonly viewed as an attribute of power, along with military and diplomatic capacities. In this context the concept of ‘fragile states’ can be seen as an attempt by state powers to describe reality in accordance with their foreign policy priorities. The contributors to this special issue seek to disentangle this reality by exploring the notion of ‘state fragility’, the conditions under which the label ‘state fragility’ emerged in certain policy circles and how it has been received by actors in fragile states. Hence the contributions to this issue are twofold in nature: they examine both the transnational emergence and diffusion of the notion of ‘state fragility’ and its reception in the so-called ‘fragile countries’. In the first part of the issue the contributors focus on major Western donors and their understanding and use of ‘state fragility’, opening the ‘black box’ and exploring the strategies at work behind the process of conceptualisation. In the second, they investigate how countries that have been labelled ‘fragile’ have internalised and reinterpreted the ‘fragile state’ classification, and how they have exploited the concept for their own strategic purposes. Scholars included in the issue argue that, on the donor side, the concept is primarily used to classify states facing major political crises or extreme poverty as ‘fragile’, ‘failing’ or ‘failed’ in order to legitimise aid spending and interventionist strategies. On the recipient side, although such labelling is generally contested, it is also frequently accepted and reinterpreted when there is the potential for political gains. The contributors find that aid-dependent states frequently exploit the notion for their own purposes, in order to delay political reforms or to convince donors to invest more aid money in ‘situations of fragility’ (especially in periods of economic crisis, when Western countries might otherwise opt for cutbacks in foreign aid spending). The ambiguous definitions of the concept open room for different processes of appropriation at the international and local levels.

The rise of the ‘fragile state’ agenda

Expressions such as ‘weak state’, ‘failing state’, ‘collapsed state’ and other variations have become pervasive, not only in practitioners’ discourses but also in scholarly works. New perspectives – such as ‘whole-of-government’, ‘3D’ (‘defence, diplomacy, development’) and ‘3C’ (‘coherent, coordinated, complementary’) approaches – have been developed in order to promote Western humanitarian, reconstruction and security policies with regard to these so-called ‘fragile states’. ‘Principles of good international engagement in fragile states’ have been drawn up by many international and regional organisations, among them the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union.1 In the US context the National Security Guidelines of September 2002 declared failed states to be a greater threat than states with ambitions of conquest.2 The EU followed suit in 2003, announcing that failed states constituted a major threat to European security as well.3 This represented a policy shift, a recognition that modern wars are ‘less a problem of the relations between states than a problem within states’.4 This analysis has been substantiated by quantitative studies showing that ‘state weakness’ is now one of the most critical factors underlying armed violence (along with outside intervention).5

This policy development echoes a similar shift in academic work (especially in peace and conflict studies), as reflected in the conceptual proliferation of new terms to describe the same basic phenomenon: ‘collapsed state’, ‘failed state’, ‘fragile state’, ‘imaginary state’, ‘absent state’, ‘lame Leviathan’, and ‘soft state’, to list just a few.6 Every concept has a specific motivation – for example, ‘lame Leviathan’ or ‘quasi-state’ focus on sovereignty and international recognition issues, while terms like ‘fragile states’ and ‘weak states’ target service delivery and ‘renegade regimes’ and ‘rogue states’ concern state behaviour.7 Nonetheless, many of these conceptual nuances boil down to insufficient state capacity or the unwillingness of a state to meet its obligations, generally understood as delivering ‘core functions to the majority of its people’.8 This intersection between policy and research priorities was the crucial element behind the rise of the ‘fragile state’ agenda in the 1990s.

Although there is nothing fundamentally new in the contemporary fragile state agenda – many anthropologists and political scientists discussed similar issues following the decolonisation movement, for instance – the agenda truly started to pick up steam in mainstream international relations in the mid-1990s. Helman and Ratner’s 1993 article played a crucial role in attracting policy and academic attention to ‘failed states’, understood here as ‘a situation where governmental structures are overwhelmed by circumstances’.9 Although the authors make a loose distinction between degrees of collapse,10 and advocate new conservatorships to deal with bona fide failed states, they do not delve much deeper into the analysis of the failed state phenomenon. Their contribution is nevertheless considered ‘authoritative’,11 in the sense that it succeeded in setting a new research agenda. A similar research agenda was at the same time pursued by Rotberg and Fukuyama, while being nuanced and given more complexity by the likes of Zartmann from the start.12

Helman and Ratner’s initial article was clearly informed by the collapse of Somalia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in the early 1990s. Significantly this period also featured rising interest from major donors and international organisations in state fragility issues. For instance, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) convened its first research-preparatory workshop on this topic in April 1993, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) organised a programme on ‘Linking Rehabilitation to Development: Management Revitalization of War-torn Societies’ at around the same time.13 The 1990s also saw a gradual rapprochement between the development and security fields – what has been termed the ‘security–development nexus’ – under the overarching umbrella of the fragile state agenda, primarily through a merger of security and development policy and the re-problematisation of security as both the result of and the precondition for development in a broader sense.14 The concept of ‘fragile states’, the term generally preferred by development experts, intersected with the concept of ‘failed states’, which was favoured by security experts and diplomats (as exemplified in speeches by former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright).15

The idea that ‘state fragility’ could be a threat to the national security of Western countries gained additional traction after 9/11, when the al-Qaeda terrorist network attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Because the government of Afghanistan was hosting members of this terrorist network, countries with no legitimate or institutionalised government were suddenly perceived as potential sanctuaries for criminal activities and global terrorism. Whether they were considered ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ in the US discourse on security, or ‘fragile’ from a development aid perspective, most analysts agreed that new policies for international security would require a focus on the capacity of national governments in the South to control security within their territories and to provide essential services to their citizens. The emerging discourse on fragile states played a role in the diffusion of this new conception of foreign policy based on the security and development ‘nexus’. The implications of the ‘securitisation’ of the fragile state discourse are spelled out in Kofi Annan’s re-conceptualisation of security threats after 9/11. For the UN Secretary-General it was clear that these threats were increasingly coming from governments that were being ‘allowed to violate the rights of their individual citizens’. These countries had thus ‘become a menace not only to their own people, but also to their own neighbours, and indeed the world’.16 An estimated 105 countries with oppressive or semi-oppressive governments fall under Annan’s sprawling definition of potential terrorist threats,17 justifying all forms of intervention by the ‘core’ democratic countries.18

In the field of development the focus on addressing the capacity of state institutions in countries facing turbulence stems from the shift towards a new aid allocation system in international assistance. In the late 1990s, while the World Bank was expressing renewed interest in the impact of adequate governance institutions on results in the implementation of aid programmes at the country level, the major traditional donors opened a debate on ‘aid effectiveness’ that resulted in the ‘Monterey Consensus on Financing Developmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. ‘Fragile States’: introducing a political concept
• 2. International Organisations and the Production of Hegemonic Knowledge: how the World Bank and the OECD helped invent the Fragile State Concept
• 3. The OECD’s discourse on fragile states: expertise and the normalisation of knowledge production
• 4. The European Union’s ambiguous concept of ‘state fragility’
• 5. Measuring and managing ‘state fragility’: the production of statistics by the World Bank, Timor-Leste and the g7+
• 6. How Sudan’s ‘rogue’ state label shaped US responses to the Darfur conflict: what’s the problem and who’s in charge?
• 7. State disintegration and power politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia
• 8. When it pays to be a ‘fragile state’: Uganda’s use and abuse of a dubious concept
• 9. State fragility and failure as wicked problems: beyond naming and taming
• Index