Fixing Fragile States

Fragile states have marched from the fringe to the very center of U.S. security concerns. Whereas once defense analysts worried only about competing powers such as the Soviet Union and China, now even the weakest of countries is considered a potential threat. “The events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states,” the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy declared. Poverty may not turn people into terrorists, but “poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels.” In a similar vein, the United States Agency for International Development (usaid) has declared, “Fragile states… are now recognized as a source of our nation’s most pressing security threats. There is perhaps no more urgent matter facing [us] than fragile states, yet no set of problems is more difficult and intractable. Twenty-first century realities demonstrate that ignoring these states can pose great risks and increase the likelihood of terrorism taking root.”¹

We have, at least for the moment, stopped ignoring fragile states. Indeed, everyone seems to have an opinion these days on how to fix fragile states. Presidents and generals, academics and aid specialists, even financiers and business executives are volunteering prescriptions for countries where the only growth industries are violence, corruption, and decay. Yet, for all the talk, there is little understanding of what ails places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, why past efforts at helping them have failed, and what ought to be done to turn them around. Moreover, despite the increasing awareness of the importance of fragile states to the West’s own security and well-being, much of the tens of billions of dollars in aid spent attempting to reform these desperate places is funding policies that actually undermine them.

Few specialists consider the possibility that diversity might actually undermine cohesion and thus retard development.

What is lacking is an understanding of, or a readiness to acknowledge, one of the fundamental forces that drives development, which is the key to all state-building exercises. This overlooked ingredient is social cohesion. Rather than deal with this prerequisite for strong states, the West looks the other way and addresses important but essentially secondary issues. The World Bank focuses on economic restructuring, nongovernmental organizations focus on social programs, and aid agencies increasingly focus on administrative changes. All these reforms are desperately needed, to be sure, but all will fail, as they have failed in the past, to transform fragile states unless those states also possess social cohesion.

Why this blind spot? One reason is that the economists who dominate the development field are temperamentally disinclined to think that a society’s makeup can trump well-designed economic policies. Another reason is that contemporary development theories and practices are deeply colored by the multiculturalism that pervades academia, nongovernmental organizations, and the media; few specialists even consider the possibility that diversity might actually undermine cohesion and might thus be a fundamental cause of retarded development. A third reason has to do with the state-centric international system. Governments and supranational organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank, which together set the international agenda for failed states, are accustomed to formulating programs around states exclusively, and therefore often fall back upon generic models of analysis that disregard sociocultural forces. And a fourth reason is simply that the development field has become so specialized that few of the people who analyze individual problems or countries ever consider the system-wide factors that bring states tumbling down in the first place.

For all these reasons, the international community has repeatedly ignored indigenous identities and social relationships and has assumed that the structure of the state has little relevance to the problems that plague underdeveloped countries. Far too many programs designed to help fragile states assume that local histories and sociocultural conditions simply do not matter. The British Institute of Development Studies scathingly concluded in 2005 that “for decades the development community has intervened in poor countries with little understanding of the political and institutional landscape, and with scant regard for the impact of their actions on local political relationships and incentives.”²

A new approach is urgently needed, an approach that recognizes the vital importance of social cohesion to the development process. This essay seeks to help stimulate the formulation of a new strategy for assisting fragile states by presenting a new paradigm of development, one that explains how today’s developed countries attained that status, why some developing countries do well despite their diversity, and what structural problems prevent fragile states from doing the same. It concludes by calling for a fundamental change in the nature and the purpose of international assistance to these troubled places. We need to stop pretending that fragile states are just less-developed versions of Western states, and to start recognizing local realities, building on local capacities, and enabling local societies to chart their own development paths.

State-building: A brief history

History shows that only two types of countries — nation-states and “state-nations” — have been able to foster progress, in both cases because they were cohesive enough to unite around a common identity and a common set of institutions. In each instance, the success of the state has rested “in its ability to provide stable and enabling institutions. . . . For institutions to be successful, they must be both legitimate in the eyes of the citizens and effective and efficient in their ability to undertake the development agenda and governance functions.”^.3

The developed nation-states. For almost two centuries, the nation-state has been the main driver of political and economic modernization. What has made that possible is the nation-state’s cohesion, usually based on its shape — one community of people in one territory. In the nation-state, the affinitive power of identity and group allegiance has been channeled into country development, encouraging stability, growth, and good governance. Building on the deep-rooted cultural heritage shared by an identity group with a long history, nation-states have constructed modern governing forms on time-tested patterns of working together informally, thereby ensuring that productive activity is relatively low-cost to transact and is well rewarded; unproductive opportunism, on the other hand, is penalized by the social community. Similarly, nation-states leverage the trust and social capital built up between members of a cohesive group to stimulate the economic activity necessary to drive development. The cohesion that these states have both exploited and fostered has encouraged the creation of more democratic and more liberal forms of government. And their citizens’ sense of a common identity makes it easier for them to accept changes in government, unfavorable court decisions, and disparities in wealth.

The evolution of these nations often involved brutal wars, ethnic cleansing, savage power politics, and forced assimilation.

All kinds of relatively cohesive societies, ranging from England’s to Germany’s to Japan’s, have successfully transformed themselves into modern states because they were able to leverage their past throughout the development process. These countries were able to form states and build nations in tandem, strengthening group identity in the process and building robust and legitimate formal institutions based on shared customs. Core groups came together in nations, rallying around a common tongue, a common culture, and shared political and economic organizations. The evolution of these countries, rarely enlightened or even deliberate, often involved brutal wars, savage power-politics, ethnic cleansing, forced assimilation, and considerable greed and egotism (as well as the construction of schools and highways). Citizens came to view other countries, rather than other groups within the state, as their true competitors, and pulled together to advance their homeland’s power and standing.

This natural evolution has been able to complete itself only in Western and Central Europe, Northeast Asia, North America, Oceania, and a few places in the developing world, where it has produced unified, effectively governed nation-states. That is because the process is protracted, typically involving many detours and taking far longer than is usually appreciated. England and France, for instance, took several centuries to evolve into modern nation-states.

In regions dominated by these countries, borders are more stable, state structures are stronger, institutions are more robust, and growth is faster than elsewhere because populations are more cohesive. Europe, after a torturous process lasting centuries, is now mainly made up of states that are based on a single dominant national identity group. The economic dynamos of Northeast Asia all have long histories as cohesive states. In North America and Oceania, strong new nations formed with the help of the institutions bequeathed by the British and fed by immigrants who actively embraced their new identity as Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, or Americans. Although some rich countries still have groups seeking autonomy or even independence — for instance, the Basques and the Quebecois — there are far fewer of them, and their differences with their countrymen are far narrower, than in the developing world.

The most successful developing nation-states in other regions have a lot in common with the wealthy countries. These developing nation-states are far more cohesive and unified than other countries in their regions because they are based on a common identity and thus contain fewer identity-driven rivalries and conflicts. Some (e.g., Kuwait, Turkey, and Korea) have organized themselves around a common cultural heritage and a recognizable political unit, while others (e.g., Botswana, Chile, and Costa Rica) had colonial borders that fortuitously left them relatively homogeneous. Vietnam, Thailand, and Mongolia are natural nation-states that bring together people with a common history, language, and culture dating back a millennium. Despite their varied reasons for achieving initial cohesion, all these countries have been able to develop by leveraging community-wide informal institutions, governance capacities, and rich reserves of social capital.

Colonialism conditioned Indians to see the whole of South Asia as one country — a vision without precedent.

The colonial exceptions: state-nations. Among the states that emerged from colonialism with multiple strong identity groups, few have developed cohesive national identities or robust national institutions from the state structures bequeathed by Europeans. The small number of heterogeneous countries that have succeeded all share a history in which the colonizing power — in every case, the British Empire — invested substantially over many generations in establishing and legitimizing new state institutions and a new national identity. These institutions proved so robust that, after independence, local elites adopted them as their own, thus helping to unify populations with disparate backgrounds. Over time, these states managed to integrate their citizens’ diverse traditions with the transplanted colonial governing bodies to form a cohesive political entity focused on national development.

India is one of the few places that benefited from colonialism because the British Empire invested significantly more money and manpower, over a far longer period, in “the Jewel in the Crown” than it did in its other possessions. Colonialism conditioned Indians to see the whole of South Asia as one country — a vision without precedent before the British arrived.

The state was one of the few colonies to gain independence with both the administrative and military capacity and necessary transportation and communication infrastructure to govern its territory. The fabled Indian Civil Service and other arms of the colonial government employed and trained hundreds of thousands of Indians in modern forms of bureaucratic administration, whereas most colonizers prepared very few, if any, locals to take the reins of government.

South Africa’s experience (in the struggle to end apartheid) was in some ways similar to India’s: a long time in which to grow accustomed to a new, imposed national identity and to new formal institutions; indigenous leaders acculturated to British norms of government through education; an elite committed to taking over, not undermining, the state’s institutions; and the inheritance of a robust administrative, security, and judiciary apparatus. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia are other examples of this phenomenon.

Few other ex-colonies, British or otherwise, have benefited from the impact and legacy of colonialism. For the vast majority of states, colonialism was a disaster at the time and its legacy continues to hobble their efforts to develop. In Africa, Europeans sought from the beginning “conquest on the cheap,” as they were “unwilling, given the high cost of administration and the low probability of reward, to develop extensive administrative networks.” Vast areas were never effectively taken over. Infrastructure was neglected where it did not lead directly to a financial return. Trains, for example, were built to ports, but rarely to connect inland territories.⁴ In many colonies, such as the Congo, few people were educated above primary-school level and the higher echelons of the national civil service were closed to locals. In most of the Middle East, Europeans drew up new borders at the end of World War I, spent just two decades administering the new states (and did so with little enthusiasm), and then promptly withdrew after World War II, leaving barely any mark on the region except for badly drawn borders. Colonial rule in Latin America, although it lasted for centuries and left an indelible mark on the region’s societies, created a new set of identity divisions and institutional weaknesses by systematically discriminating against a significant portion of the population. This discrimination vitiated the ability of national governing bodies to unite their populations.

Fragile states, fractured societies

Fragile states suffer from a multiplicity of competing identity groups, producing fractured societies with little social cohesion. Many of the difficulties confronting these countries stem from how they were created. Mostly based on borders arbitrarily drawn by Westerners, their very births forced together disparate — and often incompatible — identity groups. This left precolonial communities (or in some cases a mixture of precolonial communities and settlers) not only with no chance of evolving into more mature entities, as nation-states have done, but also without the strong, inclusive institutional framework necessary to govern newly established countries — the kind of framework, that is, that state-nations were bequeathed by their colonial masters.

The pattern established when the colonial powers arrived and built their administrations on top of, and disconnected from, local societies was essentially continued in most countries at independence: Their governments are largely divorced from the societies that they are supposed to serve. The postcolonial order, whereby Westerners have poured large sums of financial assistance into their past wards, has in many ways only prolonged these countries’ dependence on external actors for their very existence. Thus, states are prevented from reorganizing to make them better suited to local conditions and more connected to their surrounding societies. As a usaid Democracy Fellow concluded in a report for her agency, the

political disconnection [that existed at independence between state and society] was exacerbated by the economic disconnection that arose from the growing availability of external financial support. As the state became increasingly dependent on these foreign resources for its survival, it also grew increasingly autonomous of its own society and local resources, and so lost interest in that resource base as anything other than a source of plunder.⁵

The structural causes of fragility

Fragile states are plagued by two structural problems — political identity fragmentation and weak national institutions — that together preclude the formation of a cohesive population, leading to political orders that are highly unstable and hard to reform.

As William Easterly, a well-respected development economist, explains, “Ethnic diversity has a more adverse effect on economic policy and growth when institutions are poor. To put it another way, poor institutions have an even more adverse effect on growth and policy when ethnic diversity is high. Conversely, in countries with sufficiently good institutions, ethnic diversity does not lower growth or worsen economic policies.”⁶ These countries’ very divisions, for example, prevent the formation of “one of the most important requirements for making states work . . . the creation of apolitical bureaucratic structures (civil service, judiciary, police, army) supported by an ideology that legitimates the role of neutral state authority in maintaining social order through prescribed procedures and the rule of law.”.⁷ The tribalism inherent in their political cultures engulfs their already weak governing bodies, tribalizing them in the process and preventing the emergence of any apolitical bureaucratic structure that could gain some allegiance from their populations. Similarly, the weakness of the state makes each identity group fall back upon its traditional loyalties because such loyalties are the only form of protection and support available. As Easterly explains in a more recent paper, “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.”⁸

Table 1, adapted from Michael Hudson’s work on Arab politics, summarizes the fragile-state dilemma clearly. Political systems with low fragmentation and low government capabilities (square III) — features of some cohesive but not yet developed countries, such as Mali, Armenia, and Mongolia — are relatively stable but inert. These have potentially bright futures if they can foster good investment climates and improve state capabilities, because they should be able to create unified regimes backed by all their people. States with high identity fragmentation but also high government coercion capabilities available to quell internal conflict (square II), such as Syria, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and the former Soviet Union, are controlled. These countries may appear secure but are inherently weak, unable to adapt to change unless they either foster greater cohesion among their people or find a structural design or modus operandi that compensates for their divided natures. Systems marked by low political fragmentation and high state capabilities (square IV), as in the case of almost all developed countries and, albeit to a lesser extent, the state-nations, are genuinely dynamic. Only this group is institutionally capable of attaining strong legitimacy and fully tackling the challenges of development. As this grid makes apparent, states that combine low-capability governments (especially those with low coercive powers) with highly fragmented political cultures (square I), such as Iraq since its Baathist government was overthrown, Afghanistan, and many African states, give rise to the worst of all circumstances, and are inherently unstable orders. Fragile states are concentrated in squares I and II.

Much of the history of the better-led postcolonial states that start with both these disadvantages, such as Syria under Hafiz al-Assad and Ghana under Jerry Rawlings, can, in fact, be interpreted as attempts to move from square I to square II (as movement to square III is far more difficult). These countries seek to increase their legitimacy by fostering at least some semblance of national unity and by slowly increasing their ability to provide real services, including the maintenance of law and order, the construction of reasonably effective administrative organs, and the extension of education, health, and employment opportunities to a growing proportion of the population. As states develop, they will move from one of the upper squares to one of the lower squares, and from the right to the left. All Latin American countries, for instance, suffered from some form of instability during the first hundred years or so of their independence, but while progress has since been haphazard, most have become more stable and more development-oriented over time. The more cohesive entities, such as Chile, have been able to harness their unity and steadily enhance their capabilities and therefore have been able to create robust, dynamic, democratic, and increasingly prosperous regimes in recent years. Most African, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian countries are at a much earlier point in this trajectory.

Low levels of trust, high transaction costs. This political fragmentation directly impinges on the ability of these countries to foster the positive institutional environment necessary to encourage productive economic, political, and social behavior. It undermines the usefulness of traditional, informal institutional systems and squanders built-up social capital while disabling attempts to construct robust formal governing bodies. The net result is societies with low levels of interpersonal trust and extraordinarily high transaction costs.

As discussed above, cohesive groups with long common histories naturally develop their own sophisticated political, economic, and societal system of self-governance (which is incorporated into the formal governing bodies of the nation-state as it matures). This system includes various mechanisms to police members’ behavior, to lower the cost of various transactions between members, and to encourage the security of property.

Most, but not all, cohesive societies create such systems; few, if any, fragile states do so. States made up of many identity groups with no common history of cooperation and no robust governing institutions to stimulate and regulate such cooperation tend to gravitate toward “a suffocating miasma of vicious circles” whereby, as notes Robert Putman, one of the world’s most influential political scientists, “defection, distrust, shirking, exploitation, isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another.”¹⁰ Easterly contends that “high ethnic diversity is closely associated with low schooling, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign exchange markets, and insufficient infrastructure. . . . [I]nterest group polarization leads to rent-seeking behavior and reduces the consensus for public goods, creating long-run growth tragedies.”¹¹

Democratic systems cannot functionwithout trust; where there is little, there is little incentive to obey the results of elections.

Such fractured societies naturally have very low levels of trust — which Putnam describes as “an essential component of social capital” — thereby undermining cooperation, especially across groups.¹² Democratic systems cannot function without trust; where there is little trust, there is, for instance, little incentive to obey the results of elections. Prosperous economies likewise depend upon a certain level of trust: “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time.”¹³ Putnam concludes that “for political stability, for government effectiveness, and even for economic progress social capital may be even more important than physical or human capital.”¹⁴

State structures in divided countries delegitimize informal institutions without replacing them with effective formal bodies. They also destroy built-up social capital by forcing people with no common history to work together. This combination significantly raises the cost of exchange while lowering the price of assets, severely crippling economies, and sharply reducing the capacity of societies to foster development. Conducting legitimate business activities — or, for that matter, conducting any form of productive social, political, or economic exchange — carries far greater risk in fragile states than in cohesive environments.

Opportunism, corruption, and neopatrimonialism. Political fragmentation warps incentives, encouraging short-term opportunism at the expense of long-term investments that could advance development. Society becomes obsessed by the conflict between identity groups, not with generating wealth or increasing national prestige. Meanwhile, formal governing bodies and regulations, disconnected from their surrounding environments, and not having become an integral part of the informal institutional frameworks that guide people’s behavior, command only superficial allegiance and compliance.

In these fragile states, individuals are more likely to feel allegiance to a tribe, religious leader, or clan with which they and their forefathers have been closely connected than to a state with which they have few ties. Groups compete to use the formal institutions for their own selfish objectives. If one group gains control of the state apparatus, it inserts its members in important positions and drains the country’s wealth. Instead of formulating policy that might encourage growth, the ruling clique acts to control wealth-producing assets, restrict markets, disenfranchise portions of the electorate, and even dupe foreigners into providing more aid. Groups out of power see the state as illegitimate and seek to bypass it. Where cooperation does extend across clan lines, it is usually only a temporary alliance of opportunity, as cliques of various backgrounds compete to take advantage of the general lawlessness in society to siphon off money from everything from state construction projects to gold mines to warfare.

Entrepreneurs in this environment must offer large payoffs to a corrupt regime or act illegally outside state structures and the formal legal framework. The businesspeople who flourish are not those with the best educations or the best ideas but those connected by blood or marriage to the ruling clique, or those skilled at manipulating and bribing officials in charge of handing out licenses and contracts. Corruption and illegality thrive. Paperwork and procedures expand to create new opportunities for bureaucrats. Investors stay away; roads, airports, telephone lines, and other infrastructure do not get built, or if built are not maintained; businesspeople and those with advanced degrees flee to other, better places to live and work; and the country makes no progress.

The need for a new approach

Given enough time, fragile states suffering from severe identity fragmentation and weak formal institutions might be able to integrate their citizens into new nations — acquiring clearly demarcated boundaries and cohesive national identities — and to build state bodies that are both robust and that have gained the allegiance of their peoples. This evolution, however, takes a long time, stretching into centuries in many cases.

The deadly combination of weak social cohesion and feeble state institutions (in some cases complicated by difficult political geographies and a lack of a necessary critical mass of human resources and market size) creates problems that are not amenable to the types of solutions — such as more aid, competitive elections, and economic reform — typically advocated by the international community. States such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Bolivia, and Iraq cannot easily democratize because political campaigns and voting often exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, domestic tensions. For some identity groups, self-determination actually means secession; for many, it means a chance to capture control of the state — and a determination to not relinquish it thereafter. The leaders of fragile states are reluctant, anyway, to compete in competitive elections because they, and their group or clique, have far more to lose than in legitimate, cohesive states. And these countries cannot create strong institutions because few if any people profess loyalty to the state or have any incentive, given the state’s sociopolitical dynamics and informal institutional environment, to respect its laws. Bad governance in such countries cannot be fixed merely by enacting macroeconomic or administrative reforms because far more fundamental issues are causing their dysfunction. Such states, in any case, generally have a dearth of competent and honest officials willing to uphold an impersonal order — a prerequisite to introducing effective reforms.

States cannot be made to work from the outside. International assistance may be necessary but it is never sufficient to fix fragile states. Instead of seeking to impose a Western-style blueprint unsuitable for local conditions, international action should be first and foremost about encouraging the creation of governing institutions that better leverage or help form the cohesive societies necessary to promote development on their own. States work effectively when they are a logical reflection of their underlying sociopolitical, historical, geographical, human resource, and economic environments, and when they are deeply integrated with the societies they purport to represent, able to harness the informal institutions and loyalties of their citizens.

States cannot be made to work from the outside. International assistance may be necessary, but it is never sufficient.

The key to fixing fragile states is, therefore, to deeply enmesh government within society. People in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Central Asia, and elsewhere have enormous political, socioeconomic, and cultural resources built up over centuries that can serve as the foundation for political, economic, and social development. What these people and these countries need are state models and structures that can be adapted to take advantage of those resources. Foreign assistance needs to complement and reinforce local capacities and institutions and be disciplined enough to avoid undermining or warping locally driven arrangements, which is all too common today, especially with the tendency of so many international programs to focus on financial aid targets, poverty reduction targets, and the importation of generic and typically centralized state models.

Such an approach would emphasize institutional changes that foster more decentralization, greater integration of traditional norms into state institutions, a stronger focus on unity and security, and various ways of promoting accountability instead of the current myopic focus on elections, aid levels, and donor interventions. In all cases, the empowerment of local groups would be made paramount, to ensure that the state is given firm foundations.

States will work better if they are structured around cohesive groups — such as the Kurds in Iraq, the Isaaq in Somaliland, and the Aymara in Bolivia — that can capitalize on their common institutions and group affinities. Similarly, large sprawling countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan are more likely to harness existing societal bonds and capitalize on pockets of relative cohesion if they give individual regions or large urban areas (even those with multiple groups) much greater authority to manage their own affairs. In contrast, the top-down approach typically advocated by the international community ignores local populations’ indigenous capacity for institution building — and reinforces a dependency on outsiders.

In the absence of security and unity, efforts to introduce even the most basic reforms are likely to lead nowhere.

Although partition is impractical in most places, where conflict has already led to the creation of ethnically, religiously, or tribally homogeneous areas, as in Somaliland, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Kosovo, redrawing boundaries to match these divisions is far more likely to produce peace and development-oriented states than is an insistence on remixing obviously hostile peoples.

Preserving security and the unity of the state, rather than promoting Western-style personal freedoms and elections, should be paramount in fractured societies — as the Iraq experience should have made abundantly clear by now. In the absence of security and unity, efforts to introduce even the most basic economic, social, and political reforms are likely to lead nowhere. Such a change in priorities would shape how many other problems are addressed. Allowing unrestrained freedom of speech, for example, would let some religious and political leaders espouse divisive and extremist causes and encourage violence. Holding competitive elections prematurely in a post-conflict situation or prioritizing them over reforms designed to build cohesion would likely impede the whole state-building endeavor. Uganda has made substantial economic and social progress in recent years at least partly because it introduced inclusive, growth-oriented policies while limiting the extent of political reform. Uganda’s efforts, it should be noted, were led by local forces, not the international community. This was also the case in Somaliland, which is possibly the most successful recent example of state building in Africa.

Building unity among disparate peoples also needs to be a major focus of development. Competitive groups could be obliged to work together by constitutions that mandate power sharing and coalition governments — political arrangements of the kind recently embraced in Kenya. Programs that encourage a national outlook, such as conscription or other forms of national service, would strengthen citizens’ sense of a common identity. Ensuring that government money and services are distributed more fairly across disparate groups (something the international community rarely considers) could help repair societal fractures.

But there should be no illusions: it can take many generations — if not longer — to transform an entire society.

Unless donors distribute foreign aid to fractured societies in a much more disciplined manner, those donors will continue to see their money wasted and stolen. Money should not be dispensed simply to meet internationally mandated financial or humanitarian targets, such as the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. Rather, it should be used to complement local processes, so that citizens can create governments appropriate to their surroundings.

Foreign aid should not replace taxes, as is often the case today, but rather supplement them. Taxes should be the centerpiece of state building because they force governments to make policy by negotiating with local companies and interest groups, directly strengthening the state-society compact. Similarly, foreign assistance that completely circumvents governments ensures that they will never function effectively.

Although aid can fortify cohesive countries with effective governing systems, as it has in Ireland, Botswana, and Taiwan, cash alone is unlikely to produce such cohesion from scratch. Money might build hospitals and relieve poverty in the short term, but it is unlikely to help create coherent, capable states unless it is used to reinforce local capacities.

Toward a new paradigm

The new paradigm presented here harmonizes to some degree with other recent initiatives to remedy state fragility. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (dfid) has embraced a “drivers of change” analysis, “whereby dfid country offices commission work to understand countries through nontraditional aid lenses: history, culture, power dynamics, political landscape, incentives analysis and institutional analysis.”¹⁵ Similarly, the U.S. military has increasingly emphasized the importance of understanding and working with local institutions and local social structures in trying to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan.¹⁶ The significant reduction in violence in Iraq since the middle of 2007 has been based largely on “four years of hard-won knowledge of Iraq’s complex tribal and sectarian politics” that allowed local commanders to follow “a template for governance in Iraq that has existed for centuries and which even dictators like Saddam Hussein had to rely on.”¹⁷

Any new approach to fragile states will, of course, take years to yield substantial results. The obstacles to fixing fragile states are formidable and setbacks are inevitable. But if we persist with current policies — if we continue to work with an unnecessarily narrow array of instruments and to ignore some of the most important ingredients necessary for success — failure is guaranteed. The paradigm presented here offers a better model to use in formulating an appropriate strategy for these troubled, yet important places. Only by learning from the mistakes of the past and formulating polices that recognize and respond to local conditions can we construct a brighter future for the unfortunate citizens of fragile states — and a more secure future for ourselves.