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‘Fragile States’: introducing a political
concept
Sonja Grimma, Nicolas Lemay-Hébertb & Olivier Nayc
a Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of
Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
b Department of International Development, University of
Birmingham, UK
c Department of Political Science, Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne,
Paris, France
Published online: 20 Mar 2014.
To cite this article: Sonja Grimm, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert & Olivier Nay (2014) ‘Fragile
States’: introducing a political concept, Third World Quarterly, 35:2, 197-209, DOI:
10.1080/01436597.2013.878127
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‘Fragile States’: introducing a
political concept
Sonja Grimm
a
*, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert
b
and Olivier Nay
c
a
Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany;
b
Department
of International Development, University of Birmingham, UK;
c
Department 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.
Keywords: fragile state; failed states; state building; peace building;
development, foreign aid; security; international organisations; policy
knowledge; policy transfer
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)
*Corresponding author. Email: sonja.grimm@uni-konstanz.de
© 2014 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
Third World Quarterly, 2014
Vol. 35, No. 2, 197–209, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.878127
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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 con-
text 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 contribu-
tors 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 ambig-
uous definitions of the concept open room for different processes of appropria-
tion 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, comple-
mentary’) 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 Devel-
opment (OECD) and the European Union.
1
In the US context the National Secu-
rity 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 weak-
ness’is now one of the most critical factors underlying armed violence (along
with outside intervention).
5
198 S. Grimm et al.
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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 deliver-
ing ‘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’s1993 article played a crucial role in attracting policy and
academic attention to ‘failed states’, understood here as ‘a situation where gov-
ernmental structures are overwhelmed by circumstances’.
9
Although the authors
make a loose distinction between degrees of collapse,
10
and advocate new con-
servatorships to deal with bona fide failed states, they do not delve much deeper
into the analysis of the failed state phenomenon. Their contribution is neverthe-
less 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 Socie-
ties’at around the same time.
13
The 1990s also saw a gradual rapprochement
between the development and security fields –what has been termed the ‘secu-
rity–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 gen-
erally 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 ter-
rorist network attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon
Third World Quarterly 199
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in Washington, DC. Because the government of Afghanistan was hosting
members of this terrorist network, countries with no legitimate or institutiona-
lised 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 KofiAnnan’sre-conceptualisationofsecuritythreatsafter9/11.Forthe
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 gover-
nance institutions on results in the implementation of aid programmes at the
country level, the major traditional donors opened a debate on ‘aid effective-
ness’that resulted in the ‘Monterey Consensus on Financing Development’in
2002.
19
The idea that donors should better target recipient countries according
to their policy and institutional performance prepared the development commu-
nity for the establishment of new resource allocation mechanisms. These mecha-
nisms were based on the evaluation of the ‘performance’of national institutions,
ie their effective capacity to maintain governance mechanisms ensuring the
effectiveness of disbursements in official development assistance (ODA). Aid allo-
cation began to be channelled through a ‘selectivity’principle, dedicating the
most resources to countries with ‘efficient’institutions and policies.
The Western donors’interest in fragile states emerged as an indirect conse-
quence of the donors’shift towards aid selectivity. Despite the focus of aid
flows on poverty reduction (rather than economic growth), several countries
with weak capacities or in political crisis were unable to meet the new bench-
marks. The observation that the concentration of aid flows on ‘good performers’
was resulting in the marginalisation of countries with ‘ineffective’institutions
and policies inspired growing criticism of the international financial institutions
from the US Congress. The outcry led the World Bank to establish, in 2001, an
initiative targeting ‘low-income countries under stress’to address the specific
challenges of recipient countries suffering from the effects of war, violence and
political disruption.
20
Two separate World Bank internal units (the Fragile State
Unit and the Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit) contributed to the re-
framing of the discussion, moving from a focus on aid efficiency to a greater
emphasis on state- and peace building.
200 S. Grimm et al.
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Between 2001 and 2003 the OECD Development Aid Committee (OECD-DAC)
also held a series of meetings on ‘poor performers’and ‘difficult partnerships’,
which resulted in the creation of a Fragile State Group in 2003. This group paved
the way for the organisation of a ‘Senior Level Forum on Development Effective-
ness in Fragile States’(held in London in 2005) tasked with the formulation of the
‘Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States and Situations’.
21
The Forum was presented as a milestone on the way to a consensual and shared
recognition of the problem of ‘fragile states’as a new major challenge for develop-
ment. In the same year, in its Human Development Report, the UNDP published a
list of 59 ‘top priority’and ‘high priority’countries most in need of support; these
states were characterised by a combination of low human development and poor
performance.
22
Two major public donors, the USA and the UK, played a leading role in the
construction of the policy agenda on fragility within these multilateral organisa-
tions. The new UK bilateral cooperation (following the creation of the Department
for International Development (DFID) in 1997) placed special emphasis on poverty
reduction, human security and the recognition of the role of the state within devel-
oping countries, supporting economic arrangements and providing laws and regu-
lations to protect human rights.
23
US development assistance programmes also
played a critical role in the emergence of the ‘fragile state’concept in the new doc-
trine of aid selectivity, despite a systematic focus on foreign policy and national
security concerns after 9/11. In 2004, for example, the US Congress refocused the
mandate of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to emphasise
support for poor countries; it also established the Millennium Challenge Corpora-
tion, an independent agency, to assist countries selected on the basis of their
policy-performance and institutional capacities. This internalisation of the princi-
ple of selectivity within the organisational design of the US bilateral assistance
scheme created conditions that allowed the initiation of a policy discussion on
state fragility and development. In 2005 USAID drew up specific policy objectives
for intervention in fragile states (described either as ‘vulnerable states’or ‘states in
crisis’), depending on the degree of weakness of the political authority over the ter-
ritory, the capacity of the state to deliver basic services to the population and the
legitimacy of the government.
24
In line with the ‘3D’doctrine, the aid agency
incorporated defence and diplomatic objectives into its strategy for development.
In the same year developed and developing countries under the aegis of the
OECD endorsed the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, committing to make aid
effectiveness a high priority (along with other principles, such as ‘harmonisation’,
‘alignment’and the ‘ownership’of aid delivery’).
25
These aid effectiveness princi-
ples were equally applied to fragile states and ‘to environments of weak ownership
and capacity and to immediate needs for basic service delivery’.
26
Thus, promoted
by a vast array of organisations including the World Bank, the OECD and major aid
donors (including the USA, the UK and the EU), the ‘fragile state’agenda progres-
sively gained traction in the 2000s.
Critical studies vs policy analysis
Scholarly research on fragile states has undergone a similar expansion since
Helman and Ratner’s seminal contribution. At the centre of this contemporary
Third World Quarterly 201
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literature lies a complex dichotomy between ‘problem solvers’and ‘critical
scholars’.
27
Problem solvers focus on performance issues, seeking ways to pro-
vide recommendations for governments, international institutions and technical
agencies, whereas critical scholars are inclined to question the values and
assumptions underpinning the fragile state concept. From a problem-solving per-
spective some have explored the issue of the classification of ‘fragile states’and
the possibility of forecasting state collapse.
28
Others have examined the impor-
tance of traditional and non-traditional actors in state-building processes, as well
as the current production of normative standards and good practices (‘soft laws’)
in international state building.
29
In this context certain scholars have adopted a
quantitative approach to measuring state fragility, while others have opted for a
qualitative approach, investigating the specific mechanisms of state fragility in
specific case studies.
30
Another strand of the literature has approached the recent conceptualisation
of ‘fragile states’from a more critical perspective, and has done so from two
angles. On the one hand, scholars have examined the manipulation of the norm
by powerful state actors, a process that has deprived local actors of their agency
and legitimised interventions by Western governmental agencies. These research-
ers have also questioned the linkages between failed or fragile states and terror-
ism, which underlie the rationale behind the security–development nexus.
31
On
the other hand, scholars have criticised the analytical validity of the ‘fragile
state’concept itself. Ziaja and Fabra Mata show that, while most indices agree
on the classification of certain countries (such as Afghanistan, the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC) and Iraq) as fragile, the same indices significantly
diverge regarding the status of other countries (including Cuba, North Korea,
Israel and China). Hagman and Hoehne critically emphasise the ‘teleological
belief in the convergence of all nation-states’inherent in the Western concept of
‘state failure’, demonstrating the negative implications of the use of the concept
by means of empirical evidence from the Somali territories. Having analysed the
US intervention policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Nuruzzaman similarly high-
lights the negative effects of the unreflective use of the concepts of ‘state fail-
ure’and ‘state failing’in international relations. Call criticises the concept of
‘state failure’as deficient because it conflates states as diverse as Colombia,
Malawi, Somalia, Iraq, Haiti and Tajikistan and prescribes that aid donors ‘react
in a formulaic manner’to enhance state capacity –even though these countries
drastically differ in terms of security, capacity and legitimacy. Nay disputes the
analytical underpinning of the research agenda on fragile and failed states, inter-
preting the framework as the reactivation of ‘developmentalist’theories. Both
Call and Nay argue for the abandonment of the concept, as its use in such
widely divergent and problematic ways proves that it has lost all analytical
utility.
32
The contribution of this special issue
The concepts of ‘fragile’or ‘failed’states (and other derivatives) are still in
widespread use, and are arguably more central to the academic literature and to
policy making than ever before. Thanks to an increasing awareness among
scholars and policy makers of the shortcomings and limitations of the concept,
202 S. Grimm et al.
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more diplomatically formulated versions of the label have emerged, such as
‘situations of fragility’(proposed in 2007 by the OECD) and ‘countries and
regions in crisis, post-crisis and fragile situation’(a recent reframing by the
EU).
33
In this context the purpose of this special issue is to underline certain
political dynamics at play behind the logics of labelling. Building on the exist-
ing literature (especially the critical strand), the papers assembled here explore
the development of the research agenda from two different angles.
Afirst set of contributors investigates the development of the policy agenda
on fragile states from the donor perspective, questioning the structural conditions
under which international agencies have promoted (or have avoided promoting)
the discourse on fragile states. The contributors take a peek behind the scenes,
analysing the discourse of specific actors and examining the conditions of
knowledge production. Nay investigates the role played by the World Bank and
the OECD in the development and transnational dissemination of the fragile state
discourse in relation to the major traditional donors’conception of international
aid. He focuses particular attention on three distinct cognitive and normative
processes affecting the policy-oriented concepts used on the international stage:
‘normalisation’,‘fragmentation’and ‘assimilation’. Based on an analysis of the
emergence of the concept through these processes, he shows that the World
Bank and the OECD have played an instrumental part in the development of
transnational knowledge that promotes key Western-driven political standards,
conceptions and beliefs. In Nay’s interpretation the processes of making and
shaping knowledge function as contemporary forms of international hegemony.
Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu shed light on the current orthodoxy of state
building in ‘fragile’states through the investigation of concept formation within
the OECD-DAC. By combining an analysis of the discourse of the OECD with
insights into how this discourse is produced, their paper reveals the underlying
concept of ‘legitimacy’that informs OECD reports and policies. Depending on
how ‘legitimacy’is conceived, the actions and practices of state builders can
differ substantially. Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu identify two approaches to legit-
imacy under which most scholars and international organisations can be classi-
fied: the ‘institutionalist’(or ‘neo-Weberian’) approach, focusing on institutional
reconstruction, and the social legitimacy approach, emphasising the importance
of social cohesion for successful state building. Through an analysis of the nor-
mative production of the OECD, the contribution shows that both conceptions are
present in most of the institution’s reports, but also that the neo-Weberian
approach tends to prevail. The authors attribute this finding to the specific
dynamics of knowledge production within the OECD: the norms of the organisa-
tion have become a way of being and working for insiders, and the practice of
these norms by insiders helps to reproduce the organisation and its culture.
In her article Grimm criticises the fact that the EU has not (yet) agreed on a
clear-cut definition of ‘state fragility’. She highlights three factors that explain
this situation: first, the Union’s complex institutional framework, which impedes
policy coherence; second, developments at the international level that require
the Union’s compliance; and third, the EU’s diplomatic efforts to preserve coop-
erative relationships with aid-recipient countries that have been labelled ‘fragile’.
This last aspect reveals a central dilemma facing many aid donors: although
they may seek to avoid classification via a label that is perceived as highly
Third World Quarterly 203
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political, the lack of a clear-cut strategy to deal with the consequences of state
‘fragility’can deprive donors of the capacity to develop meaningful and
sustainable country-sensitive policies to overcome deficits in governance,
socioeconomic development and security.
Siqueira critically assesses the role of indicators and statistics in the labelling
and management of ‘fragile states’. After emphasising the difficulties of attribut-
ing ownership of numerical claims in fragile contexts, she subsequently ques-
tions the validity and reliability of these quantitative classifications. Focusing on
the education sector in Timor-Leste and on the World Bank’s Country Policy
and Institutional Assessment approach, the article shows how accountability and
ownership are negotiated within the context of the g7+ group of self-labelled
‘fragile states’, encouraging an examination of the power relations involved. She
concludes that statistical schemes have become increasingly entrenched in inter-
national bureaucracy by means of a self-perpetuating process of ‘improvement
in use’. As a consequence, such schemes become ever more difficult to change.
In accepting this reality, the g7+ does not resist the increasingly popular practice
of ‘fragility’quantification; instead, the group seeks to establish influence over
‘numerical claims’by joining the ‘multitude of allies’that contributes to the
definition and characterisation of ‘state fragility’.
The second set of contributors analyses the political use of the ‘fragile state’
label from a local perspective. These scholars focus on the reception, internalisa-
tion and reinterpretation of the ‘fragile state’classification from a local perspec-
tive, highlighting local agency in the process. Gabrielsen-Jumbert analyses US
responses to the conflict in Darfur, examining the ways in which the Sudanese
state has been conceptualised by ‘outsiders’and how this has affected interna-
tional intervention. Her analysis reveals that, despite frequent descriptions of
Sudan as a ‘fragile’or ‘failed’state, it is the label ‘rogue state’that has truly
taken hold in the Darfur context. This distinction has led to the prioritisation of
strategies based on ‘protection’and ‘punishment’over attempts to resolve the
underlying causes of the conflict, which a more sophisticated understanding of
the Sudanese state’s internal weaknesses and instability might have allowed.
In his contribution Heiduk illustrates how discourses on ‘state fragility’have
been instrumentalised by the Indonesian military in order to consolidate its polit-
ical and economic powers since the fall of Suharto. In the wake of an impend-
ing process of state dissolution in post-Suharto Indonesia the military has
managed to re-establish itself as the ‘guardian of the nation’by exploiting fears
of state disintegration and ‘balkanisation’. In this way it has found a way to
remove the issue of military reform from the political agenda while reclaiming
its former privileges.
Fisher suggests that the aid-dependent government of Uganda has widened
its room for manoeuvre with donors by emphasising the degree of instability in
the north of the country. By referring to the notion of ‘state fragility’, the
Ugandan regime has successfully persuaded donors to continue their support,
despite its domestic transgressions. In parallel the regime has succeeded,
according to Fisher, in taking advantage of a contradictory but equally
persuasive international discourse that presents Uganda as stable, strong and
secure. In exploring how Kampala has successfully employed both narratives to
carve out greater agency with donors, the paper emphasises the significance of
204 S. Grimm et al.
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the donors’physical detachment from the Ugandan ‘periphery’in this dynamic.
Both Heiduk and Fisher highlight the way local actors have managed to
re-appropriate the concept of ‘state fragility’and translate it for their own
purposes; the end result of such transformations may be far from the original
intentions informing the use of the ‘fragile state’categorisation.
In his concluding contribution to the issue Brinkerhoff identifies state fragil-
ity and failure as ‘wicked problems’that affect both international policy dis-
courses and international peace- and state-building interventions. The author
explores the various dimensions of ‘wicked problems’, arguing that these fea-
tures are easily observable in the fragile state arena. He also suggests that we
view the use of the fragile state concept as ‘an effort to tame the wickedness of
the state fragility/failure problem set’. Complementing the analyses offered in
this issue, he recommends not only an examination of the ‘naming’and ‘tam-
ing’of state fragility, but also the development of practices that could help both
labellers and the labelled to overcome situations of fragility.
Conclusions
The contributions to this special issue suggest three main conclusions. First,
diverging purposes are merged in the ‘fragile states’label: the latter seeks to
contribute to a conceptual approach addressing states’weaknesses, but at the
same time it constitutes a normative tool and a policy label used extensively by
international organisations and Western donor countries to legitimise their strate-
gic objectives in foreign policy. Second, the definition of ‘fragile states’is far
from stable, despite the attempts by many international institutions to create a
more rigorous definition. The term is used by various actors with different agen-
das to describe dissimilar national contexts of political disruption, institutional
weakness and economic collapse. As a result, the concept is subject to a variety
of interpretations, and its use as an analytical method of understanding the polit-
ical, social and economic factors that may increase the vulnerability and instabil-
ity of developing countries is highly problematic. The term ‘fragile state’can be
better understood as a ‘policy narrative’, as its meanings reflect the strategic
visions and political goals of its main advocates. Finally, actors in so-called
‘fragile states’have not remained passive in the process of the transnational dis-
semination of the concept. Their resources have allowed them ‘to resist, ignore,
engage with, disengage from, and exploit’international involvement.
34
It is our
hope that this special issue will help to increase awareness of these wide-ranging
dynamics and provide additional evidence of the limits of the simplistic categor-
isation of states through the use of the ‘fragile states’label.
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to the contributing authors, who endured numerous meetings (International Studies
Association annual meeting in Montreal, International Political Studies Association annual meeting in Madrid)
in order to produce a coherent set of articles for this special issue. We also thank our colleagues who served
as anonymous reviewers at various stages in the production process. We are grateful to Claire Bacher for her
careful proofreading, as well as to Katarina Lavric and Nicki Jeschke for editorial support. The financial sup-
port of the Center of Excellence ‘Cultural Foundations of Integration’at the University of Konstanz and of the
Research Assistant Scheme at the School of Government and Society, University of Birmingham, is gratefully
acknowledged.
Third World Quarterly 205
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Notes on Contributors
Sonja Grimm is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Public Adminis-
tration, University of Konstanz. She has published various studies on the transition
to democracy in post-conflict societies and on international democracy promotion
and has previously co-edited special issues of Democratization on “War and
Democratization: Legality, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness”(15, no. 3 (2008) with
Wolfgang Merkel) and “Do all Good Things go Together? Conflicting Objectives
in Democracy Promotion”(19, no. 3 (2012) with Julia Leininger and Tina Frey-
burg). More about her can be found at www.sonja-grimm.eu.
Nicolas Lemay-Hébert is Senior Lecturer in the International Development
Department, University of Birmingham. His research interests include peace
building and state building, humanitarian interventions in post-conflict or post-
disaster contexts, the political economy of international interventions, and local
narratives of resistance to international intervention. He has published various
articles in International Studies Perspectives,International Peacekeeping,Third
World Quarterly,Democratization, and the Journal of Intervention and State-
building, among others. His most recent book is Semantics of Statebuilding:
Language, Meanings and Sovereignty (2014; co-edited with N. Onuf, V. Rakic
and P. Bojanic).
Olivier Nay is Professor of Political Science, University of Paris 1 –Panthéon
Sorbonne. He is Vice-president of the French Association of Political Science
and Chair of the Political Science section at the National Academic Council.
Since 2006 he has been working on the reform of international organisations,
bureaucratic change and the transnational diffusion of policy ideas. His most
recent articles have been published in the International Political Science Review
(“Fragile and Failed States”), Journal of Public Policy (“How Do Policy Ideas
Spread among International Administrations?”) and Governance (“What Drives
Reforms in International Organizations?”). Further information can be found at
his personal webpage univ-paris1.academia.edu/OlivierNay.
Notes
1. World Bank, World Development Report 2011;OECD,Principles for Good International Engagement;
Council of the European Union, “An EU Response to Situations of Fragility”; and European Commis-
sion, “Towards an EU Response to Situations of Fragility.”
2. National Security Council, The National Security Strategy. Interestingly this strategy document was
drafted amid a period of heightened tension between the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China)
and the Republic of China (Taiwan) over the policies of the Taiwanese president, Chen Shui-bian.
3. Toje, “The 2003 European Union Security Strategy,”124–127.
4. Holsti, The State, War and the State of War, xi.
5. Stepanova, “Trends in Armed Conflicts,”71.
6. Odhiambo, “The Economics of Conflict,”292–296.
7. There is also an element of gradation in the typology of certain authors. For Robert Rotberg, ‘it is
according to their performances –according to the levels of their effective delivery of the most crucial
political goods –that strong states may be distinguished from weak ones, and weak states from failed or
collapsed’. Rotberg, “The Failure and Collapse of Nation-states,”2.
8. DFID,Why We Need to Work More Effectively.
9. Helman and Ratner, “Saving Failed States,”5.
10. Ibid. Helman and Ratner identify three groups of states whose survival is threatened: failed states, in
which the governmental structures have been overwhelmed by circumstances; failing states, where col-
lapse is not imminent but could occur within several years; and, finally, certain newly independent states
whose viability is difficult to assess.
206 S. Grimm et al.
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11. Wilde, “The Skewed Responsibility Narrative,”425; and Paris, “Ordering the World.”
12. Rotberg, “The Failure and Collapse of Nation-states”; Fukuyama, State-building; and Zartman, Collapsed
States.
13. Doornbos, “State Formation and Collapse,”281.
14. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War.
15. Yannis, “State Collapse and its Implications,”64.
16. Annan, “We can Love What We Are.”
17. Including 47 ‘not free countries’and 58 ‘partly free countries’, according to Freedom House’sFreedom
in the World 2013 report. Reasoning taken from Dempsey, “Nation Building’s Newest Disguise,”
416–417.
18. This analogy was developed by Thomas P. M. Barnett, whose book The Pentagon’s New Map proved
influential during the ‘neo-conservative moment’in the USA in 2001–2005.
19. United Nations, Monterrey Consensus.
20. World Bank, World Bank Group Work in Low-income Countries under Stress.
21. The ‘Principles for Good International Engagement’were published in 2007 by the OECD; for an over-
view of the process, see OECD,International Engagement in Fragile States.
22. UNDP,Human Development Report 2003.
23. DFID,The Politics of Poverty.
24. USAID,“Fragile States Strategy.”
25. OECD,Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, para. 3.
26. Ibid., para. 37.
27. Bellamy, “The ‘Next Stage’in Peace Operations Theory?”; and Lemay-Hébert, “Review Essay.”
28. Ziaja and Fabra Mata, State Fragility Indices; Stewart and Grown, Fragile States; and Grimm and
Schneider, Predicting Social Tipping Points.
29. Brinkerhoff, Governance in Post-conflict Societies; Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies,
Overcoming Fragility in Africa; and Wesley, “The State of the Art.”
30. For the former, see Carment, “Assessing State Failure”; and Ikpe, “Challenging the Discourse on Fragile
States.”For the latter, see Brinkerhoff, “State Fragility and Governance.”
31. For the former, see Boas and Jennings, “Failed States and State Failure,”475–485. For the latter, see
Hehir, “The Myth of the Failed State”; and Newman, “Weak States.”
32. Ziaja and Fabra Mata, State Fragility Indices, 3; Hagmann and Hoehne, “Failures of the State Failure
Debate,”42; Nuruzzaman, “Revisiting the Category of Fragile and Failed States”; Call, “Beyond the
‘Failed State’,”322; Call, “The Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’,”1491; and Nay, “Fragile and Failed
States.”
33. See Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu, as well as Grimm, in this issue. See also Mcloughlin, Topic Guide,
9–14.
34. Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance, 10–11.
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