Unhappy in Their Own Way: a Country-Based Framework for Addressing State Fragility

Unhappy in Their Own Way: A Country-Based Framework for Addressing State Fragility

Seth Kaplan[1]

In recent years, the international community has made immense progress understanding the unique challenges fragile states face and strategizing how they might be overcome. But much more needs to be done.

The issue is certainly important, as the foreign policies of Western countries will increasingly hinge on their ability to bolster these places. As fragile states lag behind in development and the establishment of security,[2] the world’s conflicts and poor people have become concentrated within their borders.[3] These conflicts have increasingly become a direct threat to the international community. Syria has become a hotbed for extremists. Boko Haram threatens Nigeria’s fortunes. Instability in Libya has spilled over into Mali and the rest of the Sahel. Achieving international security and spreading prosperity increasingly depends on improving governance in the fragile world.

Past efforts have yielded meager returns. Despite tremendous foreign aid, international engagement in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have failed to alter the vicious cycle of violent conflict, exclusion, and poverty that have long afflicted these countries. These failures are not merely inevitable products of attempts to tackle intractable problems. Rather, these failures stem in part from an inability to understand the idiosyncratic nature of fragile states and to devise solutions tailored to it. The fragile state has been a blurry concept and that blurriness has made targeted policy difficult.

The New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, an agreement forged between a set of fragile states and their international partners in 2011, is a major step forward. Designed to improve how both governments and aid agencies approach the problems these countries face, as well as improve the cooperation between them, the New Deal focuses efforts on five Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals (PSGs). In contrast to past efforts, these prioritize issues that are much more likely to reduce fragility.

However, there are clear limits to the PSGs and the efforts behind them. They are rather broad, and offer only a limited roadmap forward. They do not focus on causes, just results; do not include many important issues; and do not consider the driving dynamics that influence the goals that are included. There is no framework to assess what works well, and might be leveraged to counter the sources of fragility. Governments are supposed to undertake the fragility assessments that are meant to drive policymaking, but political and capacity constraints will naturally impede these in most places.

The international community clearly requires a more comprehensive framework for understanding and addressing state fragility that builds upon the New Deal. The best approach would be rooted in the societal and institutional dynamics that cause fragility in these countries. These fundamental dynamics frame how more formal institutions and processes work, determining the quality of government, the inclusiveness of the economic and political systems, and the strength of the centripetal or centrifugal forces acting on society. In short, fragility is a function of two variables: social cohesion and institutionalization.[4] Together, these determine the capacity of a population to cooperate and to direct this cooperation toward national-level challenges.

Bolstering fragile states, then, depends not on formal institutional reform or on targeting fragility’s visible symptoms, such as corruption, conflict, or inequity. Focusing instead on the underlying causes of fragility both provides a clearer understanding of the problems that bedevil these countries and points the way to a smarter toolbox for strengthening states. More precise diagnosis yields more targeted and effective remedies.

In this article, I offer a new Country Fragility Assessment Framework to help guide this diagnosis, as well as a set of policy recommendations that aim to directly address the sources of state fragility in its various shades. In moving beyond the traditional focus on formal processes and institutions, I arrive at a very different policy mix from that currently used.

Misdiagnosing Fragility

Past attempts to improve stability and governance in fragile states have failed because they have been based on a misdiagnosis of what causes these countries’ problems. Fragility is believed to be the result of a weak state and state-society relationship. Governments are thought to lack legitimacy because of how they are chosen. They are thought to be unable to provide quality public goods because of a lack of either capacity or willingness. Bolstering fragile states is then thought to depend on holding regular elections and increasing the ability of government to execute core functions, such as education, healthcare, and security provision.[5]

For instance, a 2012 OECD report on fragile states defined these places as unable to “develop mutually constructive relations with society” and often having a “weak capacity to carry out basic governance functions.”[6] It proceeded to highlight the importance of the state-society relationship fifteen times and the social contract thirteen, yet never touched upon the societal dynamics that determine these relationships.[7] Efforts to assess and counteract fragility have repeatedly failed because they concentrate far too much on the formal institutions of the state, ignoring the broader informal societal factors that influence these and matter most (institutions are important, but not the way donors conceive them).

Although many international actors have recognized that fragile states have unique problems and therefore require specialized responses,[8] there have not been substantial advances in determining what such specialized responses would entail. In some policy circles, there has been more emphasis on civil society, social capital, and the need for institutions to mediate between groups, but such ideas still operate at the margin of thinking on policy and have had little impact on programming.[9]

This default approach to fragility rests on a foundation of confusion regarding what constitutes a fragile state. The widely cited lists of fragile states[10] embody the ambiguity surrounding the concept. These lists comprise measures that have no causal relationship with fragility (such as population growth and income levels); are products, rather than causes, of fragility (such as violence and corruption levels); or are based on Western political norms (such as regime type).

Assessments of state fragility then suffer from two main shortcomings: First, they focus much more on symptoms than on causes, partly because of the hunger in academia and the policy world for easily observable and broadly comparable quantitative data for use in large-scale comparisons. These studies are helpful in making broad generalizations; they are less useful for assessing (and bolstering) individual countries.

Second, the concept of fragility is often based on a number of political and moral suppositions that underlie the Western conception of how states (should) work—and thus how they ought to be improved. Discussion inevitably focuses on the importance of the social contract, democracy, and human rights (and on how to reduce those security threats that affect donors). Normatively, these are important principles, but there is little evidence that existing ways of promoting such ideas can yield solutions to the fundamental challenges to fragile states. A state needs a certain minimum level of cohesion and institutionalization before it can effectively implement a democratic social contract.[11]

This blurriness of the concept is more than an academic failure. International efforts to bolster the state in places such as Somalia and Afghanistan have fallen miserably short of expectations. In Somalia, for instance, the international community has tried no fewer than fifteen times since 1991 to rebuild the Somali state in a top-down fashion—and fifteen times it has failed. Isolated from the political realities within the country, aid agencies, embassies, and multilateral organizations have repeatedly misread the country’s political dynamics and forced upon it what Somalia expert Ken Menkhaus has called “unimaginative, non-strategic, template-driven policy responses with little relevance to the Somali context and little input from Somali voices.”[12]

In Afghanistan, an overly centralized state and powerful presidency may be easier for foreign actors to engage with, but it has ensured that government is too distant and corrupt to serve the needs of most of the population and that elections make the country’s ethnic fault lines quake. The 2014 election nearly degenerated into open conflict because the stakes for winning the top office are so high that neither party wanted to concede defeat. Corruption so marred the process that it became impossible to know who actually won.[13]

Frustrations over international strategies led in 2010 to the formation of the g7+, a group of 20 fragile states that have banded together in order to share experiences and engage with donors.[14] The group seeks to broaden the agenda pursued by the international community in order to better address what it sees as the root causes of fragility.[15] The g7+ emphasizes the need to enhance political dialogue within countries and to prioritize the five PSGs in policymaking. These stress the need for inclusive political settlements, better security, wider sense of justice, and stronger economic foundations—principles that inform my concept of state fragility. It is still too early to judge the impact of the g7+, but it is clear that the priorities of leaders of the fragile world diverge from those of the donor community.

The Underlying—and Oft-ignored—Society

Structurally fragile states are not like other states. With weak institutions and unbridgeable social divisions, they function according to a different set of sociopolitical dynamics than do robust states. As such, they face uniquely formidable obstacles to stability, development, and democracy; they are trapped in a vicious cycle whereby instability and underdevelopment feed on each other. Social divisions hamper efforts at improving governance and fostering economic opportunity, which in turn creates discontent and a zero-sum competition for power and resources.

The way individuals, groups, and institutions interact and relate to one another determines whether a country is structurally fragile or not. Although the state is a key actor, its function is largely a product of how groups in society relate to one another—and to it. State capacity matters, but the functioning of the state is strongly influenced by the dynamics of the society in which it is embedded.

Social cohesion—defined as the quality of relationships between groups—determines levels of trust and collaboration and how institutions interact with one another. The more cohesive the society, the greater the likelihood that different groups and institutions will work together and manage conflict constructively. Even if consensus is ever illusive, the great majority understands the importance of working together according to a commonly accepted set of rules and values.

Social cohesion is especially important in less developed countries because formal institutions are weak and often susceptible to manipulation, corruption, and bias. Unlike their more institutionalized brethren in the developed world, these states feature formal institutions incapable of neutral mediation and enforcement of rules and unable to deliver truly public goods. As a result, elites and officials have much undue discretion to bend the rules and appropriate the resources of the state.

When formal institutions are weak, social cohesion can to a certain extent substitute to encourage leaders to resolve problems with amicability and a public spirit, as has happened at crucial points in the histories of places such as Somaliland, Chile, and Tunisia. Moreover, without social cohesion, it is very hard to improve formal institutions—the approach typically advocated by donors—because elites and officials have strong incentives to undermine reform (as it can be harmful to their interests).

On the other hand, if a state is strongly institutionalized, these social fractures matter much less because government will be much more likely to act according to a principle of neutrality, and thus be a much better and fairer manager of conflict and distributor of resources. As William Easterly explains, “good institutions are most necessary and beneficial where there are ethnolinguistic divisions. Formal institutions substitute for the ‘social glue’ that is in shorter supply when there are ethnolinguistic divisions.”[16]

Institutionalization of the state is not synonymous with strong security forces; a country can have powerful security forces that only serve the interests of a particular clan, ethnic group, or ruling clique. Rather it is about the ability of political parties, large government ministries, NGOs, and companies to effectively coordinate large numbers of people and departments, manage interactions with many other entities, and perform across many locations and over long periods of time. It is about “the extent to which the political organizations and procedures encompass activity in the society” and are able by their “adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence” to resiliently respond to the ever-growing needs of rapidly evolving societies.[17]

Seen this way, fragility can be understood as existing along two dimensions (see Table 1), with low institutionalization and low social cohesion at one corner (occupied by countries such as Somalia, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan), and cohesive, highly institutionalized nation states occupying the opposite one.[18] Systems marked by low political fragmentation and high institutionalization (category I), as in the case of almost all developed countries and developing countries such as Turkey, China, and Chile, are genuinely robust. Only this group is capable of fully tackling the challenges of development. Political systems with low fragmentation and institutionalization (category II) are relatively stable but sluggish. These have potentially bright futures if they can foster good investment climates and improve state capabilities. States with high identity fragmentation but also high government coercion capabilities (category III), such as the Soviet Union or Uzbekistan, are inherently weak and potentially unstable. States that combine low institutionalization (especially in the security realm) with highly fragmented political cultures (category IV) are fundamentally weak and unstable. Fragile states are concentrated in categories III and IV. (For more information on this categorization, see the article “Identifying Truly Fragile States” in the Spring 2014 issue of The Washington Quarterly.[19])

Table 1. Four Types of Political Orders (with Examples)[20]

Low Political-Identity Fragmentation / High Political-Identity Fragmentation
High Institutionalization (or at least high coercive capacity) / I: Dynamic
Botswana
Turkey
Chile
China / III: Fragile but Controlled
Syria (before 2011)
Soviet Union
Iraq (before 2003)
Saudi Arabia
Uzbekistan
Low Institutionalization / II: Stable but Sluggish
Senegal
Armenia
Tanzania
Bangladesh / IV: Fragile and Unstable
Nigeria
DRC
Somalia
Libya (after 2011)
Syria (after 2011)

Different combinations of fragility exist all along the continua, with even the most robust of countries having some degree of it. Progress need not be linear,[21] but it is always difficult. Wherever they are on the spectrum—and no matter how successful they are—states need to consistently reinforce their cohesion and institutions or risk seeing their fragility increase. Of course, as fragility is more a societal phenomenon than a state one, it can be concentrated in some pockets or regions of a country much more than in others (e.g., outlying areas), and encompass parts or all of more than one country at times.