Fragile States: A Donor-serving Concept? Issues with Interpretations of Fragile Statehood in Afghanistan

Abstract

Current conceptions and models of fragile statehood in conflict-affected contexts can serve the purposes of international donor governments over and above reconstruction and statebuilding. First, despite remaining ill-defined, the fragile state concept is widely utilized by donors to oversimplify analysis of complex political environments, such as that of Afghanistan, leading to inadequate bureaucratic responses. Second, current models of fragile statehood are unable to capture contextual or temporal dynamics, and invariably omit the contribution of international intervention to entrenching fragility. This is particularly the case in Afghanistan where the effects of international militarized stabilization responses have not been systematically included in fragility assessments, leading to increased insecurity. This article calls for a more nuanced approach to fragility and greater acknowledgement of the role donor governments can play in its entrenchment.

Keywords:

• fragile states
• statebuilding
• Afghanistan
• stabilization
• post-conflict intervention
• reconstruction

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers, and Dr Tom Waldman at the University of York, for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes on Contributors

Sultan Barakat is Professor of Politics and Founding Director at the Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit (PRDU), established at the University of York in 1993. He has published more than 100 scholarly articles, book chapters, papers and commissioned reports, and led the Afghanistan Strategic Conflict Assessment, commissioned by DFID, in 2008. ([email protected])

Anna Larson is a final-year PhD candidate and research fellow at the PRDU. She worked in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, conducting research at the local and national levels for the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU). She has published widely on issues of democratization, women in politics, political parties, elections and parliamentary dynamics. ([email protected])

Notes

1 The G7+ of Fragile and Conflict-Affected States is a group of 17 countries, self-categorized as some of the most fragile in the world, which was formed in 2011 primarily to lobby donor governments to commit to making aid and assistance more effective in their engagement in fragile contexts. For more information, see http://www.g7plus.org

2 Cited from a lecture given by Professor David Keen at the PRDU, University of York, 23 July 2011.

3 For more on the collapse of the Somali state, see Adam (1995).

4 Broader political and social indicators are developed in more detail in USAID's Conflict and Fragility Alert,Consultation, and Tracking System (C/FACTS), drawn up by USAID/CMM. The Fragile States Indicator framework, discussed here, was designed to complement C/FACTS, and focuses more heavily on economic indicators (USAID 2006, p. 1).

5 In 2010, a US-sponsored trade agreement (the Afghanistan–Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA)) was signed between Afghanistan and Pakistan facilitating cross-border trade and allowing Afghanistan access to the seaport of Karachi (see Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and Government of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 2010). Since the signing of this agreement, trading has remained problematic however, and the more recent signing in September 2012 of an agreement allowing Afghanistan access to the Iranian port of Chahbahar has been considered by Afghan actors a welcome alternative to the reliance on trading through Karachi (see The Guardian 2012).

6 One exception to this is a study conducted for the OECD jointly by the London School of Economics and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in 2009 that assesses the impact of decisions made during the Bonn Process on the statebuilding dilemmas donors have faced since. This political approach to analysis of fragility, including donors as actors in their own right, is rare, however (see OECD 2009).

7 This research was carried out in 2010 for the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (see Larson 2011, p. 36 for further discussion on the subject).

8 Indeed, this relationship is not dissimilar to that described by Patience Kabamba's examination of the Nande community and its relationship to central government in DRC (Kabamba 2010).