Fragile and failed states have been with us since we’ve had a state-based international order. But the interest of policymakers in such states took on a new life after 9/11. The events of that day, and subsequent terrorist attacks, made devastatingly clear just how dangerous failed states such as Afghanistan could be, not only to their own people, but to communities around the world.
Afghanistan and the neighboring tribal areas of Pakistan continue to demonstrate the threat posed by ungoverned areas to their citizens, their neighbors and the broader international community. Somalia has been a failed state since the nineties, and has recaptured the international community’s attention in recent years – not because of the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in the country, but because it has become a base and haven for pirates preying on international shipping. And an unsuccessful bomber who probably received training in Yemen has been the catalyst for a surge of international interest in that fragile state.
So what is a fragile state? There’s now a substantial body of literature on such states. And every academic or agency appears to have their own descriptor – so apart from fragile statues, you also have states that are “weak,” “failing,” “failed,” “collapsed,” “at risk,” “precarious”, “vulnerable” or “recovering”. Some of these are alternate descriptions to “fragile” and some are encompassed within it. Even the term “fragile state” has come under criticism in recent years. Some scholars now consider the term both pejorative and analytically imprecise. They claim that fragility is not an either/or concept but rather exists along a continuum, and that it is highly context-specific and comes in a variety of economic, political, and social forms. But regardless of the specific conceptual formulation, these descriptors and analyses all point to some type of significant state failure or dysfunction.
The World Bank provides a good working definition, observing such states “share a common fragility, in two particular respects: State policies and institutions are weak in these countries: making them vulnerable in their capacity to deliver services to their citizens, to control corruption, or to provide for sufficient voice and accountability. They face risks of conflict and political instability.”
Predicting conflict in fragile states
One consistent theme is the strong correlation between state fragility and conflict. Not all states experiencing conflict are fragile (India is a good example, with a number of internal conflicts, and the conflict in Kashmir), but most of them are; and not all fragile states are experiencing conflict, but almost all of them of them are or recently have. The World Bank identifies 37 fragile situations in 2010 – and all bar a small handful are post conflict or conflict affected.
It shouldn’t be surprising that there is such a strong correlation. Many of the indicators for conflict are indicators for state weakness. Low and declining growth are widely recognised indicators for conflict – and low income and weak growth typically translate into lack of state capacity. A lack of state capacity usually results in an inability to mediate between competing interests. Low income also lowers the cost of rebellion, making it more attractive to would-be rebels.
And the converse is also true. Conflict invariably has a negative impact on economic growth. Resources directed to conflict are diverted from development. Conflict destroys the infrastructure needed for economic activity. And without security, development efforts are unlikely to take hold and have the desired effects.
While the link between fragility and conflict is by now widely accepted there is certainly no similar consensus about how this link plays out in practice. Much academic work is now devoted to mapping the various causal flows between fragility and conflict. And it’s the kind of academic work that has direct relevance to policymakers, particularly when it comes to prevention and its necessary accompaniment, prediction.
Policymakers focus on the linkages in their efforts to obtain early warning of fragile states that may slip into conflict, and in an effort to ensure timely and cost-effective responses.
There is no shortage of early warning in this age of proliferating NGOs, instant and widespread internet and satellite communications, and an awareness of the threat posed by failing states. In fact, there may be too much of it – the challenge for policymakers can be to determine which of the barrage of warning they receive is credible, and requires action, and which can be ignored. The related challenge is to tie early warning to effective early action – early action here means policy response by governments and international and regional organisations. Analytical and advocacy NGOs have the luxury, and the frustration, of being able to warn, but not being able to respond.
So what kind of early warning do policymakers have access to?
Very broadly, there are two types of early warning – qualitative and quantitative warning.
The early warning produced by my organization, the International Crisis Group, is a good example of qualitative early warning. The task of our analysts is to find out what is happening and why. They identify the underlying political, social and economic factors creating the conditions for conflict as well as the more immediate causes of tension. Our role is to warn, as early and effectively as possible, those who are able to influence a situation where the risk of new or renewed conflict has reached a dangerous threshold.
Crisis Group’s particular value-added in this respect is that all our reporting and analysis is field-based. At last count we had people on the ground from 50 different nationalities, speaking between them 49 different languages. They are steeped in local language and culture, getting dust on their boots, engaged in endless interaction with locals and internationals on the scene, and operating from 9 regional offices and 17 other locations in the field.
Crisis Group also produces the monthly CrisisWatch bulletin which summarises developments during the previous month in some 70 situations of current or potential conflict, assessing for each whether the overall situation has significantly deteriorated, improved, or on balance remained more or less unchanged. This is one of the few examples of very short term early warning in the public domain.
The challenge that this kind of qualitative early warning poses for policymakers is that its credibility and hence usability relies to a significant extent on the reputation of the external provider of such analysis. It is difficult, though not impossible, for governments to make big resource allocation decisions (ie whether to intervene to seek to prevent a looming conflict) on the basis of independent, non government, analysis. Of course, governments have their own analysts, but these often they won’t have the expertise, or the institutional freedom, of their non-governmental peers. There are ways to incorporate independent qualitative analysis into governments’ own analysis and planning, but the constraints will usually act to inhibit governments from using such external analysis as the predominant basis for their early response decision making.
This is where quantitative early warning comes into the picture. The advantage (in theory) behind quantitative analysis is that it relies on verifiable data, and hence provides an independent and transparent basis for making resource allocation decisions.
That’s the theory. The reality is more complex. Quantitative warning, relying as it does on statistical analysis, requires a model of conflict with quantifiable factors that can be measured, compared and analysed. But this conflict modelling is still more of an art than a science, despite rapid advances in the field over the last decade or so. The other challenge with quantitative warning is the timeframe of its predictive ability. It is much better adapted to highlight worrying trends than to identify with great specificity a likely tipping point into violence.
Quantitative theories used to be broadly, if simplistically divided into two camps – that of greed versus grievance – with the greed camp holding that economic factors were largely responsible for conflict, and the grievance camp blaming on inequality and political, ethnic and religious grievances.
The debate has been refined in recent years – concurrent with big improvements in the data – and now is more usefully characterized as one between feasibility and regime type, with the proponents of the feasibility thesis focusing on the conditions that determine the economic viability of rebellion, whereas the regime type proponents conclude that it is political institutions and not economic conditions that are the most powerful predictor of instability.
The doyen on the feasibility side of the debate is Oxford academic Paul Collier. His models have been developed and refined over the years, but the essence of his analysis is that the defining feature of civil war is the emergence and durability of a private rebel army, and under most conditions such organizations are likely to be neither financially nor militarily feasible. Civil war will only occur if a rebel organisation can build and sustain a private army. He and his co-authors go on to argue that “where insurrection is feasible it will occur, with the actual agenda of the rebel movement being indeterminate.” Their research shows that three factors in particular are important in demonstrating feasibility of conflict – namely low per capita income, slow economic growth, and large exports of natural resources. Further variables have been recently added to the model, namely whether a country is under the implicit French security umbrella and the proportion of its population who are males in the age range 15-29, and a weaker variable that mountainous countries are more conflict prone (see “Beyond Greed and Grievance: Feasibility and Civil War”, Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler and Dominic Rohner, May 2008).
Low per capita income points to the incapacity of the state to maintain effective control over its territory. Both low income and slow growth can be interpreted as lowering the recruitment cost of rebel troops, and natural resources can provide rebel organizations with finance.
The attractiveness of this theory of conflict is that most of these factors can be quantified. And many civil conflicts over the past couple of decades can be readily explained by it – for example, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Congo, Sudan, Aceh, Niger Delta, and Cote d’Ivoire – but does not provide a robust explanation for all civil conflicts or for the lack of conflict in some states.
Collier has more recently looked at the links between democracy, development and conflict. He has argued that income level is the key factor in preventing violence during transitions to democracy. He believes that while the international community often favours promoting democracy as a solution to overcoming violent conflict, democracy also constrains the technical possibilities of government repression, and that this makes rebellion easier. Although the net effect of democracy is therefore ambiguous, he suggests that the higher is income the more likely is it to be favourable. He finds that whereas in rich countries democracy makes countries safer, below an income threshold democracy increases proneness to political violence.[i]
The regime type advocates take a different approach. The most sophisticated and sustained research on factors influencing motivation has been done by the Political Instability Task Force (formerly known as the State Failure Task Force), a panel of scholars that has worked since 1994 to collect and analyze data on political regimes and conflict around the world. Its work has focused particularly on regime type and quality.[ii]
The Task Force’s research postulates that regime type is overwhelmingly the dominant factor behind revolutions, ethnic wars, and adverse regime changes. However, the effect of regime type is not a simple function of the degree of democracy or autocracy. The starting point is that strong autocracies are rarely prone to conflict. Strong democracies are also not prone to conflict. It is certain kinds of partial autocracies and partial democracies that are much more vulnerable than other regime types, with the vulnerability depending on the patterns of executive recruitment and political participation under those regimes. A particularly strong contributor to instability is that of factionalism within the political process.
The taskforce model has four independent variables: regime type, infant mortality (as a proxy for poverty), a “bad neighborhood” indicator flagging cases with four or more bordering states embroiled in armed civil or ethnic conflict, and the presence or absence of state-led discrimination. They claim for this model an 80% success rate in identifying likely instability within a period of two years.
Interesting recent research has also looked at the linkage between climate and conflict. Studies by scholars such as Edward Miguel at Berkeley attempt to establish clear causal links between climate factors and conflict. While most studies claim that poverty (which can be intensified or induced by climate change) has suffered from questions of reverse causality – namely, whether conflict leads to poverty or vice versa – Miguel finds that drops in rainfall in Africa, clearly an exogenous factor not affected by conflict, produce drops in income, increasing the likelihood of conflict the following year by nearly half. He recommends pre-empting violence by targeting foreign aid to shore up incomes in regions where livelihood is affected by rainfall, thereby removing a short term trigger of violence.[iii]
The latest work in this field has moved beyond precipitation to looking at warming and finds strong historical linkages between civil war and temperature in Africa, with warmer years leading to significant increases in the likelihood of war. One recent research paper suggested a roughly 54% increase in armed conflict incidence by 2030 if current climate model projections are correct.[iv]
So that is a very quick run though of the current models for predicting conflict and instability. As mentioned earlier, the effectiveness of this type of quantitative analysis depends on the robustness of the models, and the quality of the data – and these are both continuing to evolve.
For policymakers seeking to establishes processes in which early response is less ad hoc and more systematic, perhaps the best course of action is to use quantitative analysis to identify a small group of fragile states at risk of violent conflict within a two year timeframe, and then incorporate external qualitative analysis to refine that list and determine the most appropriate intervention.
Policy approaches to fragile states
Another difference between quantitative and qualitative analysis is that while the former may tell policymakers when to intervene, it doesn’t give them much guidance on how. Good qualitative analysis is much better geared to inform policymakers’ interventions in particular fragile states.
So how should policymakers engage with such states? Given the variations between states, their problems, the tools available to interveners, the political will to intervene and all the other permutations, I won’t attempt to set out a menu of policy options here. However there are a number of guidelines that could usefully inform interventions in all fragile states.
1. Understand the problem.
This is perhaps a statement of the obvious – but it is salutary to understand how often the obvious is ignored when the international community intervenes. Far too often lessons painfully learned in earlier interventions are forgotten or ignored.
There is no checklist of appropriate policies for fragile states. What may have worked in Iraq for instance – such as international support for tribally based militias – is unlikely to work in Afghanistan. In fact in the latter country, the last five years have seen failed incarnations of the same policy on militias – first in the form of arbakai (tribal militias), then the Afghan National Auxiliary Police, then the Afghan Public Protection Force, and now the Coalition appears determined to repeat the failures of those initiatives with its latest effort, the Local Defense Initiative. So perhaps an exhortation to understand the problem is not quite as obvious as it seems.
Source: SomalilandPress
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