Statebuilding in Situations of Conflict and Fragility

Relevance for US Policy and Programs

The “fragile states” paradigm is at an important stage in its development. Western policy makers during the 1990s came to recognize that fragmented countries with fragile governance institutions lay at the core of much of the world’s instability. Conflicts within fragile states were understood not only as threatening to the citizens within their own borders, but as having spillover effects to their neighbors and at times more far-reaching implications such as terrorism, transnational crime, refugee flows, and infectious diseases.

Richard Downie, Mark Quarterman, Farha Tahir