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Read the articles by

Ferreira

(2017) and

Manchanda

(2017) which are required reading for this week. Respond to the following:

Before studying this week’s material, how knowledgeable were you about the concept of failed/fragile states?
Provide an example of a failed/fragile state and explain why it is identified as such.
What impact does this country’s failed/fragile status have on its neighbors?
What can, or should, the international community do to address the problems in the country that you chose?

https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395717716013

Politics
2017, Vol. 37(4) 386 –401

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DOI: 10.1177/0263395717716013
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Rendering Afghanistan legible:
Borders, frontiers and the
‘state’ of Afghanistan

Nivi Manchanda
The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Abstract
The aim of this article is to show how the partial colonisation of Afghanistan and its ‘frontier
status’ have generated discourses of state failure, which have led to the construal of Afghanistan
as a zone of exception and of permanent crisis. The main argument is that colonial spatialisations
have an enduring legacy that continues to structure the ways in which we experience and think
about the Afghan state today. The construction of Afghanistan today as a ‘failed state’ has emerged
through a historical (Anglophone) discourse that has relied heavily on the trope of the ‘frontier’ to
make sense of the place between India and Central Asia. Thus, the ‘frontier’ has played a formative
role in defining Afghanistan as a state and space and this plays out in how we interact – through
representation, policies, and intervention – with the state in the global realm today. The import of
this extends far and wide and has ramifications for our understanding of coloniality and liminality
in contemporary international relations (IR), including scholarship on sovereignty statehood, and
borders. It also has implications for a range of states and places that are considered ‘fragile’,
‘failing’, or ‘failed’.

Keywords
Afghanistan, borders, empire, knowledge, state

Received: 30th January 2016; Revised version received: 8th February 2017; Accepted: 16th March 2017

Introduction

In the present world order, characterised by crises and interventions, how has Afghanistan
come to be construed not only as the place ‘where empires come to die’ but also where
‘exceptionally bad things happen’? How has it become so closely associated with the
notion of state collapse? These questions have a significance that extends much beyond

Corresponding author:
Nivi Manchanda, Department of International Relations, The London School of Economics and Political
Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: n.manchanda1@lse.ac.uk

716013 POL0010.1177/0263395717716013PoliticsManchanda
research-article2017

Special Section Article

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Manchanda 387

Afghanistan. The aim of this article is to show how the partial colonisation of Afghanistan
and its ‘frontier status’ have generated discourses of state failure, which have led to the
construal of Afghanistan as a zone of exception and of permanent crisis.

My main argument is that colonial spatialisations have an enduring legacy that contin-
ues to structure the ways in which we experience and think about the Afghan state today.
The state in Afghanistan did not fully materialise as a ‘principle for reading reality’ or
‘scheme for intelligibility’; it was never completely exposed to the application of govern-
mental reason that occurred in Europe and – to a lesser degree – in parts of the ‘properly’
colonised world. In keeping with the themes of this Special Section, I foreground the
claim that exclusionary understandings of Afghanistan must be comprehended as violent
and racialised. In turn, ‘crises’, ‘invasions’, and ‘interventions’ are not hermetically or
temporally sealed ‘events’ but are instead produced as such in dominant international
relations (IR) narratives, in order to explain didactically, to provide short-term solutions,
and to gloss over the messy complexities that arise out of an enduring imperial power/
knowledge nexus. The crux of this article is that the construction of Afghanistan today as
a ‘failed state’ has emerged through a historical (Anglophone) discourse that has relied
heavily on the trope of the ‘frontier’ to make sense of the place between India and Central
Asia. Thus, the ‘frontier’ has played a formative role in defining Afghanistan as a state
and space and this plays out in how we interact – through representation, policies, and
intervention – with the state in the global realm today. The import of this extends far and
wide and has ramifications for our understanding of coloniality and liminality in contem-
porary IR, including scholarship on sovereignty statehood and borders. It also has impli-
cations for a range of states and places that are considered ‘fragile’, ‘failing’, or ‘failed’.

Starting from the premise that empires are ‘scaled genres of rule’ (Stoler, 2006) that
produce and rely upon differing degrees of sovereignty in their spheres of influence,
Afghanistan emerges as a particular imperial formation, but not quite a unique one. The
labels applied to the Afghan state – ‘buffer’, ‘rogue’, or ‘failed’ – are essential elements
in a story of imperial sense-making. And yet, Afghanistan’s long lineage of constructed
deviance confounds established narratives of colonisation and equally elides the state
failure literature because they both under-appreciate peripheries, frontiers, and zones of
exceptions. After situating Afghanistan in the wider critical IR literature on the state, the
discussion traces the genealogy and cartographic lineage of ‘Afghanistan’ from its appear-
ance ‘on the map’ to the current delineation of its borders, including the idea of ‘Af-Pak’
that has gained traction in both policy and academic milieus.

Afghanistan and sovereign ‘failure’

Afghanistan is, for all practical purposes, considered a ‘failed state’. The zealous state-
building projects undertaken after the intervention in 2001, many abandoned in the face
of high costs, disillusionment, and a wavering commitment to, and often half-baked con-
ception of, ‘nation-building’ are all irrevocably mired in a vocabulary of state fragility,
failure, collapse, and corruption as almost inherent and a priori conditions of Afghanistan
as a political (and territorial) entity. Stanizai (2014) strikes a chord with many when he
asks whether we can ‘afford another failed state in Afghanistan’ and cautions that its
‘fragile political structure, presently held together by a scaffolding of American military
and economic assistance, could collapse into a failed state overnight’.

The danger of Afghanistan returning to its ‘failed’ status quo – as under the Taliban –
has animated, and continues to ignite, the concerns of leaders in the Western world. In

388 Politics 37(4)

2002, for example, Tony Blair indicated Britain’s apparently positive influence on
Afghanistan in his news conference with George Bush, arguing that the West must ‘root
out the last remnants of the Al Qaida terrorist network in Afghanistan’ while helping the
country ‘go from being a failed state, failing its region and its people, to a state that offers
some hope of stability and prosperity for the future’ (quoted in American Presidency
Project (APP), 2002). German Chancellor Angela Merkel underlined the incalculable
value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention in Afghanistan in
‘protecting NATO member states from being attacked by other countries’, since, ‘as a
failed state’ Afghanistan is ‘a safe haven for terrorist groups’, allowing ‘attacks against our
alliance’ that should be prevented (quoted in American Presidency Project (APP), 2009).

The widespread use of claims such as this rests on a largely unproblematised notion of
the ‘state’ and its sine qua non, ‘sovereignty’. While the need to question the accuracy of
these ahistorical conceptions remains urgent, serious interventions have already been
made in the discipline and elsewhere. Steinmetz (2008) and Ferguson and Gupta (1998),
for instance, have shown how the state, insofar as ‘it’ can be said to ‘exist’, is a mytholo-
gised, contradictory, and constantly challenged entity. Grovogui (1996) and Hobson
and Sharman (2005) have demonstrated that imperial hierarchy and Eurocentric modes
of thought resolutely underpin notions of ‘statehood’. Mitchell (1991) has advocated
rethinking the state as a ‘rhetorical effect’ rather than, as per mainstream accounts, as a
self-generated and governing stable structure. Hill (2006) and Gruffydd-Jones (2014)
have examined the fundamental assumptions that fortify discourses of statehood, state
failure, and good governance and have deftly highlighted their fundamentally orientalist
makeup. Similarly, ‘sovereignty’ has come under the close scrutiny of scholars working
in the field of IR and in the groves of academe more generally. Bartelson (1993) has
examined the historical contingency of sovereignty in some depth, to take one prominent
example, while Krasner (1999) has labelled the sovereignty regime ‘organized hypocrisy’
because it is an international norm that is routinely flagrantly violated but is nevertheless
held up as a determining precept of the postcolonial world order. Benton (2009), on the
basis of a historical study of European empires between 1400 and 1900, argues that
Europeans imagined imperial space as ‘networks of corridors and enclaves’, and that they
constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law.

In spite of this extensive and burgeoning body of literature, much of the contemporary
work on Afghanistan remains doggedly married to discourses of state failure and col-
lapse. This has consequences for our understanding of the Afghan state and also contrib-
utes to the perpetuation of the unreflexive grammar of ‘failure’ and ‘lack’ in IR more
generally. Talk of state failure is often laden with the same normative assumptions that
accompanied the more explicit racial biases and ethnocentric baggage intrinsic to colonial
propaganda and conceptualisations of world order. The mainstreaming of ‘state failure’,
then, is a prominent instance of the manner in which an ‘ontology of difference’ (Gruffyd-
Jones, 2014) persists in subliminally structuring the current world order, with all its mate-
rial and ideological reverberations. In addition, Afghanistan is the site where discourses
of state failure are ligatured with discourses of savagery, deviance, Islamic fundamental-
ism, and chronic instability. The Afghan state is not only a failure, it is also constructed as
spineless – in constant danger of being hijacked by terrorists, it is a morally, socially, and
politically bankrupt space of contestation. It is at once part of an excluded South foment-
ing international instability through terrorism, criminal activity, and conflict associated
with the ‘axes of evil’, and a failure in terms of being able to cater to its own population,
as evinced in the form of human development indicators and corruption indices.

Manchanda 389

Theorising the failed state

The modern European state had at its disposal both force and information, to be used
towards its population in the manner it saw fit. Its strategies of governance were exported
to the colony, and sometimes finessed within, albeit not without violence or resistance.
Governmental reason, through the application of technique and the production of statis-
tics, made a host of resources available at the behest of the state (Foucault, 2007; Stoler,
2006). However, in Afghanistan, there was a palpable lack of statistical knowledge within
the state, leaving officials unable to formulate techniques or ‘tactics’ that organised or
positioned ‘things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of
means’ (Foucault, 2007: 96). Foucault termed the application of tactics to arrange and
achieve desired end as the ‘arts of governance’ or ‘governmentality’, the significant his-
torical effect of which was the governmentalisation of the state (Hevia, 2012: 6). Instead
of being based on classical notions of divine sovereign right, the arts of governance
focused attention on the preservation of the state as a sovereign entity, as opposed to the
continuation of a monarchical line. This notion of state preservation is central to contem-
porary understandings of the state as both actor and set of practices.

The Afghan state has yet to complete a full census, while maps of the country remain
woefully inadequate. ‘Ethnic maps’ are used regularly in place of conventional geographi-
cal ones. No cadastral surveys or major countrywide infrastructural projects were com-
pleted. Indeed, the establishment of cadastral maps in Afghanistan remained a top priority
of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan. This is not to argue that there were no moves
towards statistical or empirical knowledge of the Afghan socio-political universe. The
attempts to ‘governmentalise’ the Afghan state certainly prefigure the contemporary
notions of state failure, arguably during Abdur Rahman Khan’s reign but most notably in
the period between the colonial era and the Soviet Afghan war. This period of ‘high mod-
ernisation’ attempted to render Afghanistan legible through projects carried out in Southern
Afghanistan by United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Knudsen,
USAID and some German companies (Cullather, 2002; Nunan, 2016). Ironically enough,
the United States used road maps they had drawn in the 1960s to plan the (re)‘modernisation’
of Afghanistan in the 21st century. However, because these projects were piecemeal and
abandoned, the prosaic everyday social processes we recognise and name as the state were
never fully institutionalised in Afghanistan. Boundaries were demarcated and delineated,
some were respected and many persist, but with no authority – neither the British or
Russian invaders nor the native Afghan governments that mediated between these empires
and inherited the ‘state’ – exercised complete control over them.

As Mitchell (1991: 94) has argued, the establishment of a territorial boundary and the
exercise of absolute control over movement across it is crucial in order for the state to
exist as a viable political, social, and imaginative entity. The ‘mundane arrangements’ of
boundary drawing and policing (including the modern social practices of continuous
barbed-wire fencing, passports, immigration laws, inspections, currency control, etc.)
‘help manufacture an almost transcendental entity’, an entity that is ‘something much
more than the sum of the everyday activities that constitute it, appearing as a structure
containing and giving order and meaning to people’s lives’ (Mitchell, 1991).

Likewise, Scott (1998) articulates these practices as the ‘state simplifications’ needed
for grasping a ‘large and complex reality’. In order for officials to be able to apprehend
aspects of the ensemble, this complex reality must necessarily be reduced to what he calls
‘schematic categories’. On Scott’s account, the ‘only way to accomplish this is to reduce
an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions,

390 Politics 37(4)

comparisons, and aggregation’ (Scott, 1998: 77). This is a key to making citizens out of
subjects, making societies legible so as to prepare them for benevolent governance or
authoritarian exploitation, as the case may be. It is perhaps inevitable then, that the Afghan
populace is often portrayed as disconnected from and indifferent to the central govern-
ment. While some of the ‘illegibility’ of the Afghan citizenry can be attributed to acts of
resistance of the sort Scott (1990) analyses, and often romanticises, this also stems from
the feeble and patchy attempts at the institutionalisation of a viable state structure in a
polity that was territorially only delineated in the late 19th century and technically came
into being in the 20th century. This is most evident when Afghanistan is compared with
British India during the same period. While the ‘tribe’ as an analytic category was enun-
ciated, it was not quite operationalised, and epistemic and on-the-ground engagement
with ‘tribes’ in Afghanistan remained cursory and sporadic (Hopkins, 2008; Hanifi, 2011;
Lindholm, 1980). Although the notion of ‘caste’ played much the same role in India as did
‘tribe’ in Afghanistan, and both were imagined to be socially sanctioned, ingrained tradi-
tions and putative lynchpins for the Indian and Afghan socio-political universes, respec-
tively, only India’s ‘caste system’ was documented, scrutinized, and dissected. Indeed,
caste was ‘systematised’ in India, while the ‘tribe’ was not subjected to the same kind of
ethnographic and empirical knowledge.

The British experience of attempting to govern the North-west Frontier was no doubt
productive of certain limited forms of census taking and ethnographic mappings. The
period saw the production of military handbooks containing genealogical trees and tribal
customs and there was heavy reliance on the survey data gathered by European explorers,
most notably Alexander Burnes and his commercial survey mission of 1836–1837.
Nonetheless, this category of tribe was not the subject of sustained state simplification in
the way that ‘caste’ in India was (Dirks, 2001). Through these practices of abstraction,
sovereign power crystallised disparate modes of thought, contradictory elements, and
dispersed forms into schematic formulaic knowledge or what Ansorge (2014) has termed
the ‘technics of politics’. In Afghanistan, there was often an initiation of or move towards
schematisation especially for military purposes, but it was almost always abandoned in
favour of less profuse engagement, leading to ‘quasi-colonial’ statehood: a state that was
formed by colonial diktat but not occupied by colonial order, as it were.

Mapping Afghanistan: The production of a ‘periphery’

The drawing of boundaries and the establishment of borders through formal and informal
colonialism in the ‘third world’ was rarely smooth or homogeneous, and while sometimes
these marches dislodged and replaced indigenous notions of space and subjectivity, more
frequently autochthonous communities grappled with imposition through a spectrum of
strategies ranging from subversion to internalisation – strategies that usually resulted in
the creation of a hybridised political and social order. The presence and suppression of
peripheries and grey zones within the colonial periphery, although overlooked or dis-
missed in much of the literature, were necessary for the core to define itself and to repre-
sent itself as a stable and stabilising force. These liminal spaces and amorphous frontiers
were a source of friction and potential decentring for the colonial Self and hence needed
to be delimited as exceptional aberrations for the fulfilment of the symbolic order that the
colonial state saw itself as embodying and projecting outwards.

Like other liminal zones and situated frontiers (Maroya, 2003; Todorova, 2009;
Winichakul, 1994), the emergence of Afghanistan as a bounded territorial space was a long
and contested process and exemplified the messy and often contradictory realities of its

Manchanda 391

‘proto-colonial’ inception. The country’s colonial bordering took 26 years, ending in 1893
when Mortimer Durand’s eponymous line was delineated on the ground between Pakistan
and Afghanistan (Beattie, 2002; Gopalakrishnan, 1982; Hanifi, 2014: 2; Hopkins, 2007:
70–113). This now notorious border was the heftiest concession paid to the British by
Amir Abdur Rahman and entailed splitting the region in half, through the surveying of a
‘scientific frontier’, the 1200-mile boundary plotted in 1893 that bisected local homelands
and the seasonal migration routes of 3 million pastoralists (Cullather, 2002: 516). The asym-
metrical power relations between the British and the Afghans were never in question; the
Durand Line deliberately followed a topographic ridgeline that could be held at strong-
points blocking mountain passes that the British ascertained as crucial to the defence of
their empire (Cullather, 2002: 517; McMunn, 1929).

George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India between 1898 and 1905 and British
Foreign Secretary from 1919 to 1924, was responsible for the security and defence of the
North-west Frontier in its entirety and remains the colonial authority most intimately
associated with the politics of the region (Gilmour, 2004). It was Curzon who moulded
the greatly malleable and shifting ‘Afghan frontier’ by filling out the last ‘gaps’ and ‘fix-
ing’ it at the end of the 19th century. While arguably what constituted the frontier changed
in the British spatial imagination after the creation of the state of Afghanistan, ‘frontier
thinking’ continued to inform the ways in which the British viewed the Afghan state.
Curzon spoke of ‘enormous sums’ having been spent ‘fortifying the independence of’
Afghanistan, resulting in, ‘a threefold Frontier’: an administrative border, with British
India; the Durand Line, a ‘Frontier of active protection’, and the Afghan border, ‘the outer
or advanced strategical Frontier’ (1907).1

Curzon’s ‘Romanes Lecture’ from 1907 provides the classic, if often overlooked,
statement on the geopolitical imagination of colonial officials on the subject of frontiers.
He prefaces this key text by pointing out that he had been in charge of a land frontier that
was ‘certainly the most diversified, the most important, and the most delicately poised in
the world’, and that he had, as Viceroy there, ‘been called upon to organize, and to con-
duct the proceedings of, as many as five Boundary Commissions’ (Curzon, 1907: 2). He
then lays out in meticulous detail the pivotal function of the frontier in the imperial imagi-
nary, betraying a sense of disquietude and urgency in the need to deal with frontier issues
generally and the ‘Indian Frontier Problem’ more specifically (Curzon, 1907: 1–2).

The critical importance of the subject of frontiers for Curzon and, by extension, for
British India cannot be overstated. Frontiers ‘are the chief anxiety of nearly every Foreign
Office in the civilized world’, and they are ‘the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the
modern issues of war or peace, or life or death to nations’ (Curzon, 1907: 2). In his render-
ing of events, the problems faced by the Empire were primarily those that were in some
way related to frontiers, and this was certainly the case with Afghanistan. Discussing the
‘controversies’, ‘passions’, and fallen ‘reputations’ the ‘Indian Frontier Problem’ pro-
voked (Curzon, 1907), Curzon lays the intellectual ground on which the Afghan-Pakistan
frontier was to be imagined by both future generations of colonial dignitaries and by the
wider audiences that continue to be exercised by the problems posed by refractory fron-
tiers and their peoples. Colonial forms of knowledge about the frontier, and the tropes
that constitute the arsenal of this body of knowledge, continue to inform and be energised
by military studies, popular commentaries and journalistic reports on the Afghanistan–
Pakistan border today (Stewart, 2013).

In this vivid colonial imagination, the frontier demands a specific kind of response
because it is delineated as a particular space constituted by a certain breed of person. For

392 Politics 37(4)

Curzon (1907: 23), the frontier life engenders certain ‘types of manhood’ in its inhabit-
ants, ‘savage, chivalrous, desperate, adventurous, alluring’, enjoining those level-headed
servants of the empire that are at once sensitive and masculine enough to reign in the
passions and violence of frontier peoples. The frontier’s construction, both deliberate and
inadvertent, as a ‘violent geography’ therefore has a long lineage, one that is constantly
built upon and reinscribed (Gregory and Pred, 2006). Indeed, Curzon’s justification for
colonial involvement in the dangerous periphery is reproduced almost verbatim in the
plea for ‘nation-building’ and ‘solving’ the Afghanistan–Pakistan border ‘problem’ in the
war against terror (Hira, 2009; Weede, 2007; Weinbaum, 2004). Very similar logics could
be seen in action in the Balkans in the 1990s (Campbell, 1998).

The powerful emotive force of the frontier has been instrumental in setting forth a series
of policies that both simultaneously attempt(ed) to make Afghanistan intelligible to its colo-
nial authors and incorporate(d) strategies of distancing that produced the country as a black
hole, forever impenetrable to its imperial audience. An obsession with the institutionalisa-
tion of geographically ‘scientific’ boundaries established a cognitive order for the British,
allowing them to converse in a political language with which they were familiar (Bayly,
2014; Hopkins and Marsden, 2011). The boundary-making process was also constitutive of
identities, of people on both sides of the frontier as well as for the British Empire.

Frontier (govern)mentality

Governance on the Afghan/Indian frontiers relied on multiple modalities and was far
from homogeneous. What distinguished it from the colony ‘proper’ was the lack of eth-
nographic knowledge that accompanied more penetrative and holistic colonial projects,
and thus the notions of mystery, terror, and chaos that it begot. Whereas the ethnographic
or colonial state sought to define and document each aspect of the area and peoples under
its jurisdiction, on the Afghan frontier the British were concerned largely with the man-
agement of unruly tribesmen, never seriously intending to convert them into compliant
subjects of empire. This frontier, as a discursive formation, was left fundamentally incom-
plete, its contours outlined but its substance hazy. The practices of codification, classifi-
cation, disciplining, and surveillance crucial to not merely the colonial, but also the
modern, state were substituted for perfunctory policies that ensured a level of order and
acquiescence that the British state deemed appropriate. The absence of the institutionali-
sation and operationalisation of a coherent apparatus of categorisation and repression is
now singled out as the prime culprit in the ‘failure’ of the Afghan state.

Today the Afghan-Pakistan frontier is regularly depicted as the foremost site of brutal-
ity and criminality, ‘an incubator of chaos and radicalism which threatens the stability of
all who come into contract with it’ (Hopkins and Marsden, 2011: 1). This pervasive image
of the Frontier is based not only on an intellectually lazy historiography of the region but
also on conceptually crude assumptions that underlie what ‘frontiers’ as contested spaces,
areas of jurisdiction, and amorphous physical form are taken to symbolise. The
Durand, a porous border with a troubled history and disputed present has, perhaps pre-
dictably, been at the centre of the production and (re)presentation of Afghanistan, both
topographically and demographically, as a space with an innately violent disposition.

If in 1837, Governor-General Auckland bewailed the ‘haze of confusion’ that existed
beyond Lahore, in the 2000s it is customary to claim that ‘[t]he most remote place on
earth has become the most dangerous’ with respect to the Afghan-Pakistan frontier
(Johnson and Mason, 2008: 73). For most of the late 19th to early 20th century, Afghanistan

Manchanda 393

was a thorn in the side of the British Empire, a politically chaotic non-state that the
empire concentrated on isolating, rather than an entity that legitimated any sort of routi-
nised engagement. Even after all its borders had been demarcated and ‘Afghanistan’
emerged as a unified state, there remained an element of equivocation as to what exactly
it was; not only was there tension owing to the fact that British commitment to Afghanistan
wavered, but also Afghanistan as a society, polity, and an ideated space retained more
than a trace of ambiguity. Imagined and installed as a ‘type’ of political entity by the
British, it often failed to conform even to that standard. In fact, although Afghanistan is
now apprehended as a typical buffer state, for much of its existence it did not function as
one. It only became a buffer state as the British struggled to define the scope and nature
of the authority they were projecting over a space they largely failed to comprehend
(Bayly, 2016).

The Indian frontier – demarcated by the Durand Line – was a manifestation of two
distinct types of imperial control. As Hanifi demonstrates, the Durand Line represented
an increasingly violent international state system that took shape via the twinned forces
of global capitalism and imperialism. The Pashtun regions straddling the Durand Line
were generically referred to as the ‘tribal areas’ and since their inauguration, these areas,
marked out by colonial fiat, have been periodically subject to administrative reconfigura-
tion to include under their ‘jurisdiction’ other ‘ungovernable tribal spaces’. Not only were
these permutations of the tribal areas legal grey zones, where the Frontier Crimes
Regulations Acts (FCR) was enacted haphazardly in lieu of standardised civil and crimi-
nal codes, the Durand Line also noticeably altered market relations to the detriment of the
Afghans. This colonial frontier politically isolated and diverted capital away from
Afghanistan and towards British India (Hanifi, 2014: 4–6). This impoverishment of
Afghanistan through a deliberate policy of market exclusion is another facet of
Afghanistan’s ‘quasi-colonial’ status – it did not reap the ‘benefits’ of colonialism, to the
degree that they can be said to have existed in colonial South Asia.

Furthermore, the articulation of state power experienced by the Pashtuns on the southern
and eastern side of what was to become the North-west Frontier was bureaucratised, whereas
the Pashtuns in Afghanistan experienced a highly personalised and autocratic form of state
power. Without wishing to romanticise or standardise the experience of the Indian colonial
subject(s), those on the ‘right’ side of the Durand Line found themselves in a privileged posi-
tion, especially with regard to the ability to tap into the global circulations of colonial capital
vis-à-vis their Afghan counterparts. For the British, Afghanistan was a space of exception
provoking a ‘frontier governmentality’ in response (Hopkins and Marsden, 2011; Wong,
2010). A disparate set of policies that the British applied in order to govern adequately the
frontier region in particular and all of Afghanistan in general, this frontier governmentality
was paradoxical both in theory and in practice: it reduced the frontier to yaghestan, an ungov-
ernable tract of land characterised by disorder and haunted by the interminable spectre of
chaos, rather than recognising the multiplicity and diversity of the social, moral, political,
economic, and linguistic forms that populate the region. It also essentialised the frontier as a
land of unruly Pashtun tribes that needed to be curtailed and managed, although always from
a distance. This amounted to an elision and distortion that precluded the acknowledgement
of the frontier’s lived reality – the frontier had never been the sole domain of a single ethnic
or tribal group – and also the fact that it was composed of orderly administered states as well
as by regions beyond state or federal jurisdiction.

In actuality, the nature of British control on the frontier was not one of sharp demarca-
tion but of gradations of authority and dominance, with the colonial state abandoning ‘its

394 Politics 37(4)

pretence to power’ in spatial degrees (Hopkins and Marsden, 2011: 62). These shades of
imperial sovereignty, not reflected accurately on colonial maps, were formative for both
the delineation of the frontier and the lifeways of the people inhabiting the region. What
was distinctive about frontier governmentality, however, was not the fading degree of
colonial authority, but rather the firm belief that the frontier was of a peripheral and, at
best, instrumental concern to the British Indian state, a point little explored in scholarship
on the region. Although the colonial state invested ample time and effort in delineating a
scientific border, the frontier on the whole remained for it a source of ‘essential confu-
sion’, resulting in a lethargic separation between ‘settled’ (read civilised) and ‘hill’ (read
wild) populations (Hopkins and Marsden, 2011: 62). The colonial state attempted to grasp
the ‘meaning’ of the frontier in reductive terms and failed, unsurprisingly, in this venture.
Those outside the ambit of a few invasive colonial systems and other localised organised
systems of governance were cast as social, political, and economic pariahs, their history
consigned to the figurative ash heap.

Frontier governmentality in sum was essentially an exercise in delegitimising certain
‘tribal’ mindsets and ways of being. By relegating the frontier to the land of mystery and
bedlam, the colonial state carved the frontier, and Afghanistan more generally, as a space
of insufficiency. If questions of power always already inhere in questions of knowledge
and vice versa, the frontier remained a space of exclusion from power and a place of
‘subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 2003: 11) in which the British comfortably rendered
some peoples less governable than others.

‘Af-Pak’ as exception(able)

The production of Afghanistan as liminal and exceptional historically continues to have
far-reaching and deep-seated ramifications today. Afghanistan as a political entity is tenu-
ous; it is ‘a space, not a place, as the territory is sandwiched high on the frontier of the
Indian subcontinent’ (Allan, 2001: 545). As a buffer-state, a moribund political formation
particularly susceptible to ‘state death’ (Bayly, 2016: 4), there have been calls to merge
part of Afghanistan with Pakistan, most powerfully captured with the coining of the neol-
ogism ‘Af-Pak’ or AfPak (Taheri, 2009). Talking to a military conference in Munich in
2008, Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Pakistan and
Afghanistan and the man credited with inventing the term, explained Af-Pak as an attempt
to indicate a singular ‘theater of war’, marked by the Durand Line and ‘straddling an ill-
defined border’, with the sovereign, but terrorist-filled, territory of Pakistan on the East
and the arena of action for NATO and ‘other forces’ on the West (cited in Quinon, 2009).

In this final section, I want to propose that ‘Af-Pak’ is not, as some of its proponents
are prone to claim, a retrospective concession that has taken into account the complex
realities of the region and its residents, and which has acknowledged the need for a uni-
fied homeland for the Pashtun people. Holbrooke’s description seems, on the surface, the
most straightforward way to cut the Gordian knot, recognising the artificiality of the
Durand Line and, more generally, the arbitrary processes of imperial boundary-making to
which the genesis of modern Afghanistan may be traced. The popularity of ‘Af-Pak’, as
attested to, principally but not solely, in the US foreign policy discourse, can, however,
more convincingly be read as an expedient measure in dealing with the Afghan or
Pashtun ‘problem’. Albeit less unsavoury than the alternative ‘Talibanistan’ (Bergen and
Tiedemann, 2012), ‘Af-Pak’ is a lightly camouflaged racist and, as I explain below, a state
racist, manoeuvre that seeks forcefully to homogenise a border and its inhabitants in an

Manchanda 395

attempt to ‘isolate the chaos’ both intellectually and on the ground. By cordoning off the
region in this way, it becomes easier to sanction and implement certain types of knowl-
edges, in order to justify political and military policies that would otherwise be consid-
ered objectionable or as infringing upon the sovereignty of a nation state. Finally,
following directly from the point above, ‘Af-Pak’ in both its framing and its purported
aims is an exercise in rendering Afghanistan a ‘space of exception’, a place where a tem-
poral suspension of the rule of law has become the permanent order, producing a ‘zone of
indistinction’ (Agamben, 2000). Such zones are non-spaces where ‘everything is truly
possible’ and the people living in them are considered outside the remit of ‘politics’,
abandoned subjects, not quite animal but not fully human, leading lives that are expend-
able, or ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 2000: 38; Agamben, 1998). For Agamben, ‘the camp’
exemplifies this permanent transitional zone of indistinction, but the Afghanistan–
Pakistan border zone fits equally well here. Not quite colonised, not quite a sovereign
state, and not even a designated political precinct, Afghanistan is a ‘non-space’, produced
as a liminal zone in both academic inquiry and in its practical administration and made
‘exceptional’ because of its social, or its ‘tribal’ composition.

The mainstreaming of Af-Pak extends beyond popular ventures such as the Foreign
Policy magazine’s ‘AfPak’ channel and military projects like the US Department of
Defense’s ‘AfPak Hands Program’, which was created in 2009 to ‘develop a cadre of
military and senior civilian experts specializing in the complexities of Afghanistan and
Pakistan – the language, culture, processes, and challenges’ (Miles, 2012). The Af-Pak
Hands programme is marketed as a ‘knowledge base’ that works to get ‘expertise from
the theater into key billets’ (Miles, 2012). Both these undertakings treat Afghanistan and
Pakistan as a singular challenge to be surmounted, or a unified theatre of war, possessing
one ‘language and culture’. Similarly, Foreign Policy’s ‘Ultimate AfPak Reading List’ is
a comprehensive guide to ‘Af-Pak’ compiled by Peter Bergen (2013), handpicked from
his course syllabi at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the John Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies. I mention this not as a minor cavil about a
hastily crafted, seemingly inconsequential neologism, but to point to an axiomatic mani-
festation of ‘discourse in/as action’. India’s leading newspaper, The Hindustan Times’
explicit reference to ‘AfPak’ as a ‘geography of terror’ and the bleak future it augurs in an
article published in 2014 betrays exactly these logics.

The ‘integrated’ solution – which asserts that the elision of two territories on either
side of an ‘ill-defined border’ will help to dismantle the ‘terror infrastructure’ – expressly
overlooks the very dissimilar types of states that have come to shape the region and the
divergent forms of the modernising processes they have unleashed on its local denizens.
The expression ‘Af-Pak’, as Hopkins and Marsden (2011: 3) uphold, ‘offers little in the
way of historical sensitivity or cultural knowledge’. The utilitarian (for American mili-
tary and policy purposes) amalgamation of lived spaces is resented by Afghans and
Pakistanis alike, inhabitants on both sides of the border consider the coinage insulting,
as it ignores the manifold and elaborate self-identifications and socio-political alle-
giances that they claim (Hopkins and Marsden, 2011; Macdonald, 2009; Spiegel, 2009:
3). More perniciously, the ‘theater of war […] call[ed] AfPak’ (Holbrooke quoted in
Cooper, 2008) is used to blockade, raze, and declare the area ‘dangerous’ to Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and the ‘West’, as evidenced in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director
Michael Hayden’s 2008 assertion that the ‘Af-Pak’ border ‘presents a clear and present
danger to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, and to the West in general, and to the United States,
in particular’ (quoted in Tristam, 2009).

396 Politics 37(4)

The politics of naming here is also explicitly linked to both a politics of shaming –
Af-Pak is a non-state, a failed political project – and a politics built on the premise that
some people need not be heard from, indeed that ‘their’ lives are more disposable than
‘ours’. Not only does ‘Af-Pak’ erase the modern history of Afghanistan by declaring it an
‘artificial state’, it portrays occupants situated on either side of the border as a homogene-
ous group inhabiting a single undifferentiated space, a move that is not only unhistoric but
also one that has caused visible distress to the people inhabiting the region (Gould and
Fitzgerald, 2011). ‘Af-Pak’, devised to signal the need to offer an ‘integrated’ solution to
the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, and its perceived Al Qaeda associates in Pakistan,
has provided precisely the sort of apologia for increased militarism in the region that its
inventors had in mind.

‘Af-Pak’ is best conceived as an exemplification of the phenomenon that Foucault
referred to as ‘state racism’. In its attempt to erase the differences in cultural dispositions,
religious affiliations, and political inclinations, to parenthetically lump people together as
the ‘enemy’ or ‘terrorist’ populations for the purposes of war, ‘Af-Pak’ becomes a unified
theatre of operations against which the chosen or ‘superior’ populations at the home front
must be defended (Riccihardi, 2009). Foucault (2003: 254–255) argues that modern war-
fare is waged in the ‘name of life necessity’, in defence of a distinct population, one that
is racialised as the predominant and worthy one. The marshalling and mobilisation of a
superordinate population inaugurates in its wake a mechanism of ‘introducing a break
into the domain of life that is under power’s control’, a ‘break between what must live
and what must die’ and ‘a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a popula-
tion’. That, for Foucault (2003), ‘is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create
caesuras’.

State racism is a racism directed by a nation state against its own citizens, an ever-
present authorised possibility of murder that is intrinsic to the biopolitical state. It is
‘inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States’ (Foucault,
2003: 254). Although Foucault himself examined the implications of state racism as prac-
tised by European states against their own citizens, using Nazi Germany as its grotesque
exemplar, he nevertheless acknowledged that it was a broad concept, one that subsumed
other political conflicts such as class struggle. State racism and its prerogative, the right
‘to make die’, what Mbembe (2001) calls ‘necropolitics’, finds its most deathly and sur-
reptitious manifestation as a tactic applied on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. Not only
does state racism in this instance distinguish between ‘enemy’ populations and the liberal
(Western) subject residing at ‘home’, but, more crucially, it separates the ‘civilian’ popu-
lations of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the ‘border’ populations, simplistically con-
ceived of as tribal terrorists and mad jihadis. The hierarchised set of relations that
effectively segregate ‘target’ populations in the creation of ‘Af-Pak’ is close to a perfect
instantiation of the ways in which the historico-political discourses of war contain inher-
ently the discourse of ‘race struggle’ that Foucault has expertly exposed in his lectures. As
Reid (2006: 145) notes, there is a strong affinity between Fanon’s phenomenological
lament in relation to the experience of race war and Foucault’s theorisation of state rac-
ism, since both focus on the subjugation of a particular population within the ‘racial epi-
dermal schema’ of colonial and intra-state power relations, respectively. In ‘Af-Pak’ state
racism appears to function at multiple levels – both at the level of the West fighting wars
in the name of ‘life necessity’ so as to defend its own citizens, and also through the expor-
tation of a state racism to the West’s designated theatre of war, by choosing the popula-
tions that have the right to live and those that must die.

Manchanda 397

Equally significantly, this state racist homogenising of the border through the deliber-
ate revoking of a segment of the population’s ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt, 1966) is
instrumental in carving out the border region, and Afghanistan more generally, as a space
of exception. As I argue, here Agamben’s ‘bare life’ is (re)created in all its minutiae: peo-
ple inhabiting a lawless space randomly subject to drone strikes, transitive populations
encamped, disenfranchised, and outside the discourse of citizenship. However, these
zones of exception and in-between spaces are necessarily produced in the interstices of
empire for the continued operation of the microphysics of power. ‘Af-Pak’ is much more
than an arbitrary appellation: it is the social restructuring of the region through a his-
torico-political discourse that stems from a racialized and exclusionary world order,
which depends on the necessary production of zones of exception, violent geographies,
marginalised peripheries and liminal, even suspended subjectivities. ‘Af-Pak’ can be
thought of as a capstone in the anxious topology of power; not fully accepted into the
official folds of empire, Afghanistan was nevertheless never quite out of what Stoler
(2006: 140) calls ‘imperial bounds’, but more especially it has always been in an imperial
bind. The state’s trajectory from ‘buffer’ to ‘failed’ to ‘non-’ state is the distinctive but not
unique story of a precarious empire’s (both Britain’s and America’s) attempts at taxono-
mising and categorising. It captures the tension in colonial penetration of the region: at
times invasive and intense, at others languid and abandoned.

Conclusion

Afghanistan has had 17 different national flags in the 20th century, apparently the
greatest number of any country in the world (Allan, 2001: 545). To signal this varied
and amorphous nature of the Afghan territory and polity, Lord Curzon surmised with
reference to Afghanistan’s northeastern border that ‘these artificial expedients […]
have no durability, unless they are based upon some intelligible principle of construc-
tion or defined by a defensible line, and are administered by an authority capable of
preserving order’ (Curzon, 1907: 24). The Wakhan corridor, he suggested, ‘can only
last so long as the Amir of Afghanistan, to whom it was handed over, with a special
subsidy from Great Britain, fulfils his undertaking to maintain order’ (Curzon, 1907).
Conventional wisdom’s alluring construction of Afghanistan as a failed state thus
stems almost tautologically from Afghanistan as a state born of failure. What is dis-
tinctive about Afghanistan today is not that it was an arbitrary colonial creation. The
carving up of Afghanistan was much like most places in the colonial world. Indeed,
arguably all states, like continents and other accepted geographically bounded enti-
ties, are discretionary constructs and only over time become reified. What makes
Afghanistan atypical is its incessant re-creation as an arbitrary blip on the world map,
its re-inscription as a space of exception on the fringes of humanity that demands
‘special treatment’. The spatialisation of Afghanistan over time, moreover, is a story
of imperial expedience. Its construal at various points as a buffer, or a failed state, or
as a theatre of war, has meant that colonial power can intervene, bomb from a dis-
tance, nation-build, and leave, as it sees fit, with impunity.

The recursive representation of Afghanistan as somehow characterised by a ‘lack’,
as defined by an absence of ‘normality’, is especially pronounced when it comes to
discourses of statehood, nation-ness, and sovereignty. In these multiple constructions as
‘failed’, ‘buffer’, or ‘frontier’ – asserted in accordance with the needs of colonial power
at different historical junctures – the Afghan state has been the focal point of much

398 Politics 37(4)

analysis and has been almost always found wanting, making it easier to relegate it to the
realm of exception and marginality. Together with other partially colonised liminal
zones, including Siam (Thailand), Sudan, and Somalia, and possibly Persia (Iran) and
the Balkans, Afghanistan is simultaneously produced as a known object and a quintes-
sentially unknowable terrain. The presence of this periphery constitutes the symbolic
Other against which a stable Self can be posited. The ambiguous political and geo-
graphical cartography of the Afghan state is necessary for the continued propagation of
an empire that rests on the dense armature of hazy spatiolegal categories (Gregory and
Pred, 2006: 4). It is also another instantiation of the colonial anxiety to impose order
and render intelligible its ‘doubles’ in what Foucault (1986) called ‘Other spaces’.
Stoler’s words on the creative and seemingly ambivalent idiom of US-led intervention
in the 21st century are strikingly resonant in the discourse on Afghanistan. This lexicon
of the US intervention, articulated most fervently in the war against terrorism, is reveal-
ing and ‘suggests not a marginal imperial form but a more comprehensive picture of the
varied and changing criteria by which empires sanction appropriations, occupations,
and dispossessions’ (Stoler, 2006: 141).

Afghanistan’s status at the ‘threshold of vague political status and territorial ambiguity’,
then, is fundamental to contemporary technologies of rule and biopolitical governance
(Stoler, 2006: 141). This article has shown how knowledge production about Afghanistan is
a living testament to the country’s peripheral status, both in geographic and political terms,
in the current world order. Afghanistan confounds mainstream postcolonial discourse,
which draws its theoretical and empirical significance, research agendas and critiques
largely from the experiences of major colonies such as India (for Britain) and Algeria (for
France). The Afghan experience also highlights the complexity and ambiguity in colonial
cartographic practices and the way in which ‘tricky’ spaces are rendered legible. Finally, by
problematising mainstream IR approaches to notions of ‘statehood’ and ‘state failure’, this
article opens up important avenues for future research into ‘liminal spaces’ and border-
zones in global politics.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Penny Griffin, James Eastwood, Paul Higate, Alex Anievas, and Chris Rossdale
for their valuable comments. Many thanks also to the editorial team of Politics and the two anonymous review-
ers for their insightful suggestions.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note
1 The Romanes Lecture, delivered annually since 1892 in Oxford, is a prestigious free public disquisition.

Curzon (1907) lecture was a landmark speech not only on the subject of frontiers but also as a statement
on the indispensability of British for the functioning of the Empire.

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Author biography
Nivi Manchanda is a London School of Economics (LSE) Fellow in International Relations Theory. Her research
interests include race, gender, and the legacies of colonialism in International Relations. She is currently work-
ing on a book manuscript entitled Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge
Production which is based on her award-winning PhD thesis. She is co-editor of the book Race and Racism
in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (Routledge, 2015) and co-convenor of the
Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial British International Studies Association working group.

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individual use.

Third World QuarTerly, 2017
Vol

38, No. 6, 1291–1309
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1257907

Measuring state fragility: a review of the theoretical

groundings of existing approaches

Ines A. Ferreira

School of international development, university of east anglia (uea), Norwich, united Kingdom

ABSTRACT
State fragility has become a resonant term in the development
discourse over the past decade. In its early days it served as a catch-all
phrase used by donor organisations to draw attention to the need to
assist ‘fragile states’. In response to the call for a better understanding
of how to deal with these countries, there was a surge in measures of
fragility. However, it was not long before academics pointed to the
murkiness and fuzziness of the term, and identified several caveats to
most of the proposals for quantification. This paper reviews existing
approaches to operationalise this concept, distinguishing between
those that offer no ranking or only partial rankings of fragile states,
and those providing ordinal lists of countries. The examination of their
theoretical underpinnings lends support to the critical view that most
existing approaches are undermined by a lack of solid theoretical
foundations, which leads to confusion between causes, symptoms
and outcomes of state fragility

Introduction

Over a decade has passed since the term ‘fragile states’ was adopted in the development
vocabulary. The literature is now extensive and reflects the concerns of policymakers and
the donor community over security and development as well as the urgency from academics
to provide answers to their question

A growing number of review studies have engaged with different aspects of the fragile
states discourse. In the early 2000s there was a lack of consensus on how to define the term,
and a tendency to use it interchangeably with other expressions, such as ‘weak performers’,
‘failing states’ or ‘failed states’. In the face of these disparate views, some authors have
attempted to organise the lexicon by describing the evolution of the term, and by attempting
to categorise existing definitions.1

This increasing popularity, but also confusion, in the use of the term has led to the emer-
gence of several critical voices, motivated by the political aspects inherent to labelling a
country as a ‘fragile state’. While some have focused on the concept itself,2 others have looked
more broadly at the discourse on state fragility. Among the latter studies, a few authors have
discussed the (lack of sound) theoretical groundings of related concepts, such as state

KEYWORDS
Fragile states
fragility
measurement
index
ranking

ARTICLE HISTORY
received 23 May 2016
accepted 3 November 2016

CONTACT ines a. Ferreira i.afonso-roque-Ferreira@uea.ac.uk; http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6174-4810

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6174-4810

mailto: I.Afonso-Roque-Ferreira@uea.ac.uk

http://orcid.org

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6174-4810

http://www.tandfonline.com

1292 I. A. FERREIRA

failure.3 More recently, a growing number of studies have looked into the underlying agendas
of donors and recipient countries, and, specifically, into the political aspects inherent to the
concept of fragile states.4 Grimm, Lemay-Hebert and Nay distinguish between ‘problem
solvers’, who focus on performance issues and provide policy recommendations, and ‘critical
scholars’, who question the values and assumptions underlying the concept.5 Notwithstanding
the existing scepticism, according to Brinkerhoff, the ‘wicked problems’ of state fragility and
failure remain in good currency despite their weaknesses.6

In parallel to the concerns with how to deal with fragile states, there was an obvious
need to identify the countries that fell under that category. This was met by a profusion
of quantification efforts, which either adopted existing indices, such as the Country Policy
and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), to obtain lists of fragile states, or developed alternative
measures, expressly aimed at measuring state fragility (eg Fragile States Index, Index of
State Fragility). Yet, similarly to the attempts to define the concept, agreement is yet to be
reached on how to measure state fragility. Different frameworks and methodologies have
resulted in diverse lists and rankings of fragile states. These measures, and especially the
popular use of indices, have been the object of scrutiny by different authors. Touching
upon issues of conceptualisation, methodological approaches, and related technical
aspects (eg coding and aggregation procedures), studies by Fabra Mata and Ziaja,
Wennmann, and Gutierrez Sanin have pointed out several limitations to the existing meas-
ures.7 The latter provides a comprehensive assessment of measurement instruments, iden-
tifying some problems emerging in different stages of index building, and highlighting
the importance of a sound theoretical grounding for maintaining coherence in the con-
struction of the measure.8

The aim of this paper is to contribute to existing reviews by focusing on the attempts to
operationalise the concept of state fragility, departing from existing studies that concentrate
exclusively on the definitions of fragile states. The goal is to build upon the aforementioned
work focusing on the implications of a lack of definitional clarity, and to scrutinise the the-
oretical roots of existing conceptualisations, in line with previous studies looking at the
theory underlying the concept of state failure. It is argued that, with some exceptions, there
is a failure to clearly discuss the theoretical underpinnings upon which they are based.
Additionally, none of the reviewed approaches provides a clear distinction between symp-
toms and causes of state fragility.9

The paper is structured as follows. The next section offers an outline of existing approaches
for measuring state fragility, whereas the third section is concerned with scrutinising their
theoretical groundings. The final section summarises the key conclusions and offers some
suggestions for future analysis.

Overview of existing measures

As the term became more and more ingrained in the development discourse, there was a
growing concern with identifying the countries deemed fragile states, which in turn required
some form of quantitative assessment of fragility. In response to this need, a number of
analytical tools emerged aimed at operationalizing the concept and measuring different
dimensions of state fragility. The baseline is the identification of a set of indicators that
capture these perceived dimensions. Frequently, though not exclusively, these indicators
are then aggregated to obtain an index of fragile states. In some cases, this measure serves

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 1293

as a basis to establish a threshold level below which countries will be classified as fragile
states, and/or to form rankings of countries. In other cases, the analytical exercises result in
the identification of different categories of fragile states.

The following paragraphs provide more detail about the existing tools to measure state
fragility, differentiating between approaches that provide: (1) no rankings of countries or
only partial rankings of countries within those groups; and (2) overall rankings of countries
according to their degree of fragilit

No ranking or partial rankings of fragile states

I start by considering the first group of proposals, which focus on identifying different groups
of fragile states, based on specific criteria. Table 1 includes a summary of their main
characteristics.

Stewart and Brown provide lists of countries according to the number of classifications
of ‘failure’ or ‘risk’ in each of the dimensions identified (authority, service delivery, and legit-
imacy), but no ordering of the countries is attempted.10 More specifically, different indicators
are used for each dimension, considering distinct thresholds for situations of failure and risk
of failure. The same applies to Goldstone et al., who, apart from a distinction between failing
and failed states, only discuss examples of countries that fit into each of the 10 (five for each
category), non-comparable, stylised scenarios they identify.11 These stylised scenarios are
derived using a methodology that comprises five sequential steps, and serve as a basis to
identify adequate strategies for intervention.

In the case of the approaches providing partial rankings of countries, these refer only to
the groups identified in the analysis. Call’s conceptualisation of fragility distinguishes
between three ‘gaps’ – in authority, legitimacy, and capacity.12 The author provides a ranking
of the top 20 countries with the worst performance in each of these dimensions, based on
their score in the indicator considered for each of the gaps. This division is used to provide
some guidance for response in countries corresponding to each category, and some exam-
ples of countries experiencing one, two and all of the gaps are also included. Gravingholt,
Ziaja and Kreibaum obtain clusters of countries according to similar criteria and provide
country rankings for each group using their degree of ‘typicality’.13 These authors consider
a set of indicators for each of the dimensions of fragility they identify (authority, capacity
and legitimacy). A mixture model is used to obtain different clusters of countries according
to different combinations of these three dimensions, and ‘typical’ countries are also identified.
Still, in both cases it is not assumed that the obtained classification of fragile states is
ordinal.

Proposals providing overall rankings of fragile states

I turn now to the proposals of overall rankings of countries derived from fragility indices,
whose main characteristics are summarised in Table 2. I focus here on the most frequently
used indices for the measurement of fragility and on those whose description specifically
refers to this concept, namely: the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy (CIFP) Fragility Index,
the aforementioned CPIA, the Fragile States Index, the Index of State Weakness in the
Developing World, and the State Fragility Index. All the scores resulting from these proposals
are continuous (except for the State Fragility Index), thus enabling a full ranking of countries.

1294 I. A. FERREIRA

Ta
bl

e
1.

P
ro

po
sa

ls
p

ro
vi

di
ng

n
o

ra
nk

in
g

or
p

ar
tia

l r
an

ki
ng

s o
f f

ra
gi

le
st

at
es

Re
fe

re
nc

e
Co

nc
ep

t
D

efi
ni

io
n

an
d

di
m

en
si

on
s

Th
eo

re
tic

al
ro

ot
s

In
di

ca
to

rs
a

nd
m

et
ho

do
lo

gy
Ca

te
go

rie
s

Ca
ll1

Fa
ile

at
es

ag
ile

st
at

es
Th

fin
iti

on
o

f f
ra

gi
lit

y
is

b
as

ed
o

n
ga

ps
in

th
re

m
en

si
on

s:
c

ap
ac

ity
,

se
cu

rit
y,

a
nd

le
gi

m
ac

Th
e

ra
tio

na
le

fo
r e

ac
h

of
th

e
di

m
en
si
on

s i
s e

xp
la

in
ed

, b
ut

th
er

e
is

n
o

di
sc

us
si

on
o

f i
ts

th
eo

re
tic

fo
un

da
tio

ns
.

Ca
pa

ci
ty

is
p

ro
xi

ed
b

e
im

m
un

is
at

io
n

ra
te

cu
rit

y
by

r
ic

e
an

d
Pa

tr
ic

k’
s i

nd
ex

o
f

se
cu
rit
y,
a
nd

th
e

in
di

ca
to

r o
f

le
gi

tim
ac

y
is

a
c

om
bi

na
tio

th
e

ra
tin

gs
o

p
ol

iti
ca

l r
ig

ht
s i

n
th

e
Po

lit
y

iV
d

at
a

se
t w

ith
c

iv
il

lib
er

tie
s

ra
nk

in
gs

o
f F

re
ed

om
h

ou
se

20
06

di
ca

to
rs

a
re

n
ot

gr
eg

at
ed

Pr
op

os
es

a
c

at
eg

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is

at
io

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ac

o
rd

in
g

to
th

rt
ic

ul
ar

g
ap

s
th

ey
c

on
fr

on
t.

Co
un

tr
ie

s a
re

si
gn

at
ed

a
s f

ol
lo

w
s:

‘

w
ea

k
st

at
es

’,

w
he

pe
rie

nc
in

ca
pa

ci
ty
g
ap

; ‘

w
ar

-t
or

n
st

at
es

’

he
n

ex
pe

rie
nc

in
g

a
se

cu
rit

y
ga

p;
‘r

ep
re

ss
iv

to
cr

ac
ie

s’,

w
he
n
ex
pe
rie
nc
in
g
a
le
gi
tim
ac
y
ga

ol
ds

to
ne

e
t

al
.3

Fa
ili

ng
st

at
es

ile
d

st
at

es
‘S

ta
te

s t
ha

t a
re

“f
ai

lin
g,

” “
in

fa
ilu

re
,” o

r
“r

ec
ov

er
in

g
fr

om
fa

lu
re

,” m
ay

b
e

co
ns

id
er

ed
a

s a
ll

–
in

v
ar

yi
ng

gr
ee

s –
fr

ag
ile

st
at

es
’ (

3)
. T

ca
pa
ci
ty

o
f t

he
st

at
e

ca
n

as
se

ss
ed

a
cc

or
di

ng
to

fo
ur

di
m
en
si
on

o
f s

ta
te

–s
oc

ie
ty

la
tio

ns
: p

ol
iti

ca
l,

ec
on

m
ic

, s
oc

ia
l,

an
d
se
cu

rit
y.

T
he

c
om

bi
na

tio
n

lo
ss

o
f e

ffe
ct

iv
en

es
s a

nd
le

gi
tim

ac
y

in
e

ac
h
of
th

es
e

fo
ur

d
im

en
si

on
s

re
su

ts
in

st
at

ilu
re
.

St
at

e
fr

ag
ili

ty
a

nd
fa

ilu
re
a
re

se
en

re
la

tio
n

to
st

ab
ili

ty
. T

he
a

na
ly

si
s i

s
bu

ilt
u

po
n

an
in

st
itu

tio
na

lis
t

pe
rs

pe
ct

iv
e,

a
cc
or
di
ng
to

w
hi

ch
‘[

w
]

he
n
st
at

es
a

re
fa

ili
ng

, f
ai

le
d,

o
r

re
co

ve
rin

g,
la

st
in

g
st

ab
ili

sa
tio

n
de

pe
nd

o
n

re
bu

ild
in

g
in

st
itu

io
ns

w
ay

s t
ha

p
ro

vi
de

la
st

in
g

in
ce

nt
iv

es
to

c
oo

pe
ra

iv
e

be
ha

vi
ou

r’
(6

).
Ba

se
d

on
th

as
su

m
pt

io
n,

th
e

au
th

or
s b

ui
ld

a
n

in
st

itu
tio

na
l m

od
el

d
efi

ni
tio

n
of

w
ar

ni
ng

si
gn

s b
as

on
th

re
sh

ol
ds
fo
r e
ffe
ct
iv
en

es
s

an
d
le
gi
tim
ac

y
in

e
ac

h
of

th
e
fo
ur

di
m
en
si
on

op
os

es
fi

se
qu

en
tia

l s
te

ps
to

id
en

tif
y

st
yl

is
ed

sc
en

ar
io

s a
nd

p
ro

po
se

ea
tm

en
t s

tr
at

eg
ie

s.
Th
e

tw
o

ov
er

al
l c

at
eg

or
ie

s
di

st
in

gu
is

tw
ee

n
fa

ili
ng
a
nd

fa
ile
d
st
at

es
, a

nd
w

ith
in

e
ac
h
of

th
es
e

gr
ou

ps
fi

ve
st

yl
is

sc
en
ar
io
s a
re

id
en

tifi
ed

G
ra

vi
ng

ho
lt,

aj
a

an
d

Kr
ei

ba
um

St
at
e
fr
ag
ili

ty
Fr

ag
ili

ty
is

c
on

ce
pt

ua
lis

ed
a

s t
he

ve
rs

e
of

st
at

eh
oo

d,
w

hi
ch

in
tu

co
m

pr
is

es
th

re
e

di
m
en
si

on
s:

th
or

ity
, c

ap
ac

ity
a

nd
le
gi
tim

ac
y.

it
is

a
rg

ue
d

th
at

e
ac
h
of
th
e
th
re
e
di
m
en
si
on

s h
as

b
ee

n
th

cu
s o

ce
rt

ai
n

st
ra

nd
o

f p
ol
iti
ca

l t
he

or
y

an
d

re
pr

es
en

ts
a

p
ar

tic
ul

ar
ty

pe
o

f
st

at
e-

–s
oc
ie
ty

re
la

tio
n.

T
he
c
on
ce
pt

a
ut

ho
rit

y
is
b
as
ed
o

n
a

co
rp

or
at

is
t s

tr
an

d
of

p
ol
iti
ca

l
th

eo
ry

, s
ta

te
c

ap
ac

ity
d

ra
w

s f
ro

th
e

id
ea

o
f t

he
e

xi
st

en
ce

o
f a

nt
ra

ct
ua

l r
el

at
io

ns
hi

p
be

tw
ee
n
st
at
e
an
d

so
ci

et
y,

a
nd

le
gi

tim
ac
y
is

riv
ed

fr
om

th
e
co
ns

tr
uc

tiv
is

rs
pe

ct
iv

th
e
st
at

Th
e
in
di
ca
to

rs
o

f a
ut

ho
rit

y
ar

m
on

op
ol

y
of

v
io

le
nc

e,
h

om
ic

id
es

tt
le

d
ea

th
s.

Ca
pa
ci
ty

pr
ox

ie
d

by
u

nd
er

-5
m

or
ta

lit
y,

im
ar

y
en

ro
lm

en
t,

ac
ce

ss
to

at
er

, a
nd

b
as

ic
a

dm
in

is
tr

at
io

Ph
ys

ic
al

in
te

gr
ity

ri
gh

ts
v

io
la

tio
ns

,
pr

es
s f

re
ed

om
v

io
la
tio
ns
, a
nd

an
te

d
as

yl
um

b
y

co
un

tr
y

or
ig

in
a

re
u

se
d

as
in

di
ca
to
rs
o
f
le
gi
tim
ac

y.
T

he
a

gg
re

ga
tio

n
of
th
e
in
di
ca
to

rs
is

m
ad

e
by

ta
ki

ng
th

in
im

um
v

al
ue

th
at

a
ny

o
f t
he

in
di
ca
to

rs
ta

ke
s i

n
a

gi
ve

n
co

un
tr

y
ye

ar
. a

m
ix

tu
re

m
od

el
is

th
en

u
se

d
to

id
en
tif
y

cl
us

te
rs

o
f c

ou
nt

ie
s,

ba
se

d
on

th
e

sa
m

pl
e’s

sh
ap

Ba
se

d
on
th
e
th
re
e
di
m
en
si
on

s,
si

x
gr

ou
ps

o
f c
ou
nt

ie
s a

id
en
tifi
ed

w
ith

a
se

ve
nt

h
gr

ou
p

fo
rm

ed
b

y
th

e
gr

ou
p
of

co
un
tr
ie

s n
ot

in
cl

ud
ed

in
th

e
gr

ou
pi

ng
s b

ec
au

se
o

f t
he

ir
hi

le
ve

l o
f u

nc
er

ta
in

ty
. T

yp
ic

co
un
tr
ie
s a
re
id
en
tifi
ed
fo
r e
ac
h
gr
ou
p.

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 1295

o
rd

er
ed

a
lp

ha
be

tic
al

ly
a

cc
or

di
ng

to
th

e
re

fe
re

nc
e.

So
ur

ce
s:

1 C
al

l, “
Be

yo
nd

th
e ‘

Fa
ile

d
St

at
e.’

” 2
ri

ce
a

nd
P

at
ric

k,
“i

nd
ex

o
f S

ta
te

W
ea

kn
es

s.”
3 G

ol
ds
to
ne

e
t a

l.,
“S

tr
at

eg
y

Fr
am

ew
or

k.”
4 G

ra
vi

ng
ho

lt,
Z

ia
ja

a
nd

K
re

ib
au

m
, “

St
at

e
Fr

ag
ili

ty
”;

an
d
G
ra
vi
ng
ho
lt,

Z
ia

an
d
Kr
ei
ba
um

, “
d

is
ag

gr
eg

at
in

g
St

at
e

Fr
ag

ili
ty

.” 5
St

ew
ar

t a
nd

B
ro

w
n,

“F
ra

gi
le

S
ta

te
s.”

St
ew

ar
t a

Br
ow

n5
Fr

ag
ile
st
at

es
Co

ns
id

er
th

at
fr

ag
ile
st
at
es
a

re
th

os
e

th
at
a
re

fa
ili

ng
, o

r a
t r

is
k

of
fa

ili
ng

,
w

ith
re

sp
ec

t t
o

au
th

or
ity

,
co

m
pr

eh
en

si
ve

se
rv

ic
e

en
tit

le
m

en
ts

le
gi
tim
ac
y.

N
o

re
fe

re
nc
e
is
m
ad

e
to

th
e
th
eo

ry
o

f
th

e
st

at
e

un
de

rly
in

g
th

e
id

en
tifi

ca
–

tio
n
of
th
es
e
di
m
en
si

on
s.

St
at

e
fa

ilu
re
is
p
ro
xi
ed
b

y
et

hn
ic

o
r

ci
vi

l w
ar

. T
he

a
bs

ol
ut

e
se

rv
ic

e
en

tit
le

m
en

t i
nd

ex
c

om
bi

ne
s c

hi
ld

m
or
ta
lit
y,
p
ro

vi
si

on
o

f c
le

an
w

at
er

d
pr

im
ar

y
sc

ho
ol

e
nr

ol
m

en
t.

le
gi
tim
ac

y
fa

ilu
re
is
p
ro
xi
ed
b
y
th

ve
l o

f d
em

oc
ra

tic
g

ov
er

n-
an

ce
. i

n
th

e
la

st
tw

o
di

m
en
si
on

s,
bo

th
a

bs
ol

ut
e

an
d

pr
og

re
ss

iv
e

m
ea

su
re

s a
re
c
on

si
de

T
he

al
ys

is
is

b
as
ed
o
n
th

e
de

fin
iti

of
th
re
sh
ol
ds
fo
r e
ac
h
in
di
ca
to

r,
w

hi
ch
a
re
th
en
c
om

bi
ne

Pr
ov

id
e

lis
ts

o
f c
ou
nt

ie
s f

or
e

ac
h
of
th

e
th

re
e
di
m
en
si

on
s,

di
ffe

re
nt

ia
tin

g
be

tw
ee
n
fa
ile
d
st
at
es
a

nd
c

ou
nt
rie
s a

t r
is

k
of

fa
ilu
re
.

1296 I. A. FERREIRA

Ta
bl

e
2.

S
el

ec
te

d
lis

t o
f f

ra
gi
lit
y
in
di

ce
s.

In
st

itu
tio

n
In

de
x

A
im

a
nd
d
im
en
si
on
s
Th
eo
re
tic
al
ro
ot
s
In
di
ca
to
rs
a
nd
m
et
ho
do
lo

gy
Ra

nk
in

gs
Ca

rle
to

n
u

ni
ve

rs
ity

1
Co

un
tr
y
in
di
ca
to
rs

fo
r

Fo
re

ig
n

Po
lic

y
(C

iF
P)

F
ra

gi
lit
y
in
de
x

t
as

se
ss

es
st

at
e

pe
rf

or
m

an
ce

on
g

th
re
e
di
m
en
si
on

s o
f s

ta
te

–
ho

od
–

a
ut
ho
rit

y,
le

gi
tim

ac
y,

pa
ci

ty
(a

Th
e

co
nc

ep
t o

f a
ut
ho
rit

y
dr

aw
s o

n
th

e
W

eb
er

ia
n

de
fin

iti
on

o
f t
he
st
at
e
an
d
is

si
m

ila
r i

n
so

m
e

re
sp

ec
ts

M
an

n’
s2

d
efi

ni
tio
n
of

sp
ot

ic
p

ow
er

. T
he

co
nc
ep

t o
f l

eg
iti

m
ac
y
is

ba
se
d

on
W

eb
er

’s
de

fin
iti
on

of
th
e
st
at
e
an
d

on
a

m
be

r o
f a

ss
um

pt
io

ab
ou

t t
he

c
ha

ra
ct

er
is

tic
s o

f
a

le
gi

tim
at

e
st

at
e.

T
he

de
fin
iti
on
o

f c
ap

ac
ity

si
m

ila
r t

o
M

ig
da

l’s
3 i

n
its

fo
cu
s o
n
th
e
st
at
e-
so
ci

et
y

re
la

tio
n,

th
ou

gh
th

e
au

th
or

s f
ol

lo
w

th
e

u
ni

te
d

N
at

io
ns

d
ev

el
op

m
en

t
Pr

og
ra

m
m

e
(u

N
d

P’
s)

oa
de

r u
nd

er
st

an
di

ng
.

M
or

e
th

an
7

0
in

di
ca
to
rs

, m
ea

su
rin

g
pe

rf
or

m
an

ce
in

g
ov

er
na

nc
e,

on
om

ic
s,

se
cu

rit
y

an
d

cr
im

hu
m

an
d

ev
el

op
m

en
t,

de
m

og
ra

ph
y,

d
en

vi
ro

nm
en

t.
Fi

rs
t,

st
ru

ct
ur

in
di
ca
to
rs
a

re
g

ro
up

ed
a

nd
a

m
po

si
te

in
de

x
fo

c
ou

nt
ry

pe
rf
or
m
an
ce
a

lo
ng

th
os

e
si

x
ca

te
go

rie
s i

s c
on

st
ru

ct
ed

. T
he

re
su

fo
r e
ac
h
co
un
tr
y

ar
e

th
en

a
ve

ra
ge

d
in

e
ac

h
su

bj
ec

t c
lu

st
er

(a
lC

).
Th
e

sc
al

e
is

1
–9

(l
ow

fr
ag

ili
ty

to
h

ig
h

fr
ag
ili
ty

).
Co

un
tr

ie
s h

av
e

sc
or

es
fo

r t
he

ffe
re

nt
c

om
po

ne
nt

s o
f t

he
a

ap
pr

oa
ch

a
nd
a
n
ov
er

al
l s

co
re

o
ve

ra
ll

fr
ag
ili
ty

sc
or

es
a

bo
ve

6
.5

a
re
c
on
si
de

re
d

se
rio

us
.

W
or

ld
B

an
k4

Co
un
tr
y
Po
lic

y
an

d
in
st
itu
tio
na

l
as

se
ss
m
en

t
(C

Pi
a)

it
re

pr
es

en
ts
th
e

qu
al

ity
o

f a

co
un

tr
y’

p
re

se
nt

p
ol

ic
y

an
d
in
st
itu
tio

na
l f

ra
m

ew
or

k,
in

rm
s o

f h
ow

c
on

du
ci

ve
it

is
to

fo
st
er
in
g

po
ve

rt
y

re
du

ct
io

su
st

ai
na

bl
e

gr
ow

th
, a

nd
th

eff

ec
tiv

e
us

e
of
d
ev
el
op
m
en
t
as

si
st

an
ce

. i
t i

s b
as
ed
o

n
fo

di
m
en
si
on
s:

e
co

no
m

m
an

ag
em

en
t,
st
ru
ct
ur
al

po
lic

ie
s,
po
lic
ie
s f

or
so

ci
al

in
cl
us

io
n/

eq
ui

ty
, a

nd
p

ub
lic

ct
or

m
an

ag
em

en
t a

in
st
itu
tio
ns
.
N
o

de
ta

ile
d
re
fe
re
nc
e
to
th
e
un
de
rly
in
g
fr

am
ew

or
k

m
en

tio
ne

d
in
th
e

m
ai

n
do

cu
m

en
ts
.

Si
xt

ee
n

cr
ite

ria
re

la
te

d
to
th
e
fo
ur

di
m
en
si
on

s.
Fo

r e
ac

h
di

m
en
si
on
,
co
un
tr
ie
s a

re
ra

te
d
on
a

sc
al

e
of

(lo
w

) t
o

6
(h

ig
h)

. T
he

ra
tin

g
pr

oc
es

s
in

cl
ud

es
: (

1)
a

b
en

ch
m

ar
ki

ng
p

ha
se

rin
g

w
hi

ch
th

er
e

is
th

tin
g

of
a

al
l b

ut
re

pr
es

en
ta

tiv
e

sa
m

pl
e

co
un
tr
ie

s s
el

ec
te

d
fr

om
a

ll
re

gi
on

an
d

(2
) a

se
co

nd
p
ha
se

, d
ur

in
g
w
hi
ch
th
e
re
m
ai
ni
ng
c
ou

nt
rie

s a
re

ra
te
d

us
in

g
th

e
sc

or
es

fr
om

th
e

be
nc

hm
ar

k
co

un
tr
ie
s a

s g
ui

de
po

st
s.

ea
ch

o
f t

he
fo

ur
c

lu
st

er
s w

ei
gh

s 2
5%

of
th
e
ov
er
al
l s
co
re
.
Th
e
sc
al
e
is

1
–6

(l
ow
to
h
ig
h)

. F
ra

gi
le
st
at

ar
e
co
un
tr
ie

w
ith

a
C

Pi
a

sc
or
e
of

3
.2

o
r

le
ss

. ‘F
ra

gi
le

S
itu

at
io

ns
’ h

av
e:

e
ith

er
(1

) a

ha
rm

on
is

ed
a

ve
ra

ge
C

Pi
a
co
un
tr
y
ra
tin

g
of

3
.2

o
r l

es
s,

or
(2

) t
he

p
re

se
nc

e
of
a

u
ni
te
d
N
at
io
ns

(u
N

) a
nd

/o
r r

eg
io

na
l

pe
ac

e-
ke

ep
in

g
or

p
ea

ce
-b

ui
ld
in
g

m
is

si
on

du
rin
g
th
e

pa
st

th
re

e
ye

ar
s.

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 1297

o
rd
er
ed
a
lp
ha
be
tic
al

ly
b

y
th

e
in

de
x

na
m

e.
So

ur
ce

s:
1 C

ar
m

en
t e

t a
l.,

“2
00

6
Co

un
tr
y
in
di
ca
to
rs

”;
Ca

rm
en

t,
Pr

es
t a

nd
S

am
y,

“F
ra
gi
le
S
ta

te
s

Fr
am
ew
or

k”
; C

ar
m
en
t a
nd
S
am
y,

“a
ss

es
si

ng
S

ta
te
F
ra
gi
lit

y”
; a

nd
h

tt
p:

//
w

w
w

4.
ca

rle
to

n.
ca

/c
ifp

/ff
s.h

tm
.

2 C
ite

d
in

C
ar

m
en
t,
Pr
es
t a
nd
S
am
y,
“F
ra
gi
le
S
ta

te
s F

ra
m
ew
or

k,”
8

6.
3 i

bi
d.

, 8
4.

4 W
or

ld
B

an
k,

“C
Pi

a
20

11
C

rit
er

ia
”;

W
or
ld
B
an
k,

“h
ar

m
on
is
ed

l
is

t.”
5 F

un
d

fo
r P

ea
ce

a
nd

F
or

ei
gn

P
ol

ic
y,

“F
ra
gi
le
S
ta

te
s i

nd
ex

at
a.”

6 r
ic

e
an
d
Pa
tr
ic
k,
“i
nd
ex
o
f S
ta
te
W
ea
kn
es

s.”
7 M

ar
sh

al
l a

nd
G

ol
ds
to
ne

, “
G

lo
ba

l r
ep

or
t o

n
Co

nfl
ic

t”
; a

nd
M

ar
sh
al
l a

nd
C

ol
e,

“G
lo

ba
l r

ep
or

t.”

Fu
nd

fo
r

Pe
ac

e;
Fo

re
ig

n
Po

lic
y

jo
ur

na
l5

Fr
ag

ile
st

at
es

in
de
x

(F
Si

)
Ba

se
d
on
th

e
co

lle
ct

io
n

of
d

at
a
on

th
e

ex
is

tin
g
so
ci

al
a

ec
on
om
ic
, a
nd
p
ol
iti
ca

l a
nd

ili
ta

ry
, p

re
ss

ur
es

fa
ce

d
by

e
ac

h
co

un
tr

y,
it

a
llo

w
s t

id
en

ifi
ca

tio
n
of
th

e
no

rm
al

es
su

re
s t

ha
t a

ll
st

at
es

ex
pe
rie
nc
e,
a
nd
th
os

e
pr

es
su

re
s

th
at
a
re

p
us

hi
ng

th
e
st
at
e
to
w
ar

ds
th

e
ed

ge
o

f f
ai

lu
re
.
Th
e

m
os

t c
om

m
on

a
tt

rib
ut

of
st

at
e
fr
ag
ili
ty
in
cl

ud
e

‘th
e

lo
ss

o
f p

hy
si

ca
l c

on
tr

ol
o

f i
ts

rr
ito

ry
o

a
m

on
op

ol
y

th
e
le
gi
tim
at
e
us
e
of

fo
rc

th
e

er
os

io
n

of
le

gi
tim
at
e
au
th
or
ity

to
m

ak
e

co
lle

ct
iv
e
de

ci
si

on
s;

a
n

in
ab

ili
ty
to

pr
ov

id
e

re
as

on
ab

le
p

ub
lic

se
rv
ic

es
; t

he
in

ab
ili

ty
to

te
ra

ct
w

ith
o

th
er
st
at
es
a

s
a

fu
ll

m
em

be
r o

f t
he

te
rn

at
io

na
l c

om
m

un
ity

’,
bu

t n
o

in
fo

rm
at

io
n
is

in
cl
ud
ed
o
n
th
e
un
de
rly
in
g
th
eo
ry
o
f s
ta
te
.

Si
x

so
ci
al
a

nd
e

co
no

m
ic

in
di

ca
to
rs
a
nd

si
x

po
lit

ic
al
a
nd

m
ili

ta
ry

in
di
ca
to

rs
,

an
d

m
or

e
th

an
1

00
su

b-
in

di
ca
to
rs

.
Th

e
Co

nfl
ic

t a
ss

es
sm

en
t S

of
tw

ar
e

To
ol

a
tt
rib
ut
es
a
sc
or
e
to
e
ac

h
in

di
ca

to
r m

ea
su

rin
g
th
e
si
gn
ifi
ca

nc
e

of
th

e
va

rio
us

p
re

ss
ur

es
to
th
e
co
un

tr
y.

T
he
o
ve
ra
ll
as
se

ss
m

en
t

re
su

lts
fr

om
a

tr
ia

ng
ul

at
io
n
of

th
es

e
re

su
lts

, q
ua

nt
ita

tiv
e

an
al

ys
is

a
nd
a

qu
al

ita
tiv

e
ex

am
in

at
io
n
of
th
e

m
aj

ev
en

ts
in
th
e
co
un
tr
ie
s.
Th
e
sc
al
e
is

1
–1

20
(l

ow
fr

ag
ili
ty
to

h
ig

h
fr

ag
ili

ty
).

in
th
e
re

po
rt

c
ou
nt
rie
s a
re

ca
te
go

ris
ed

b
y
sc
or

e
qu

ar
til

es
: a

le
rt

0–
12

0)
, w

ar
ni

ng
(6

0–
90

),
st

ab
le

0–
60

),
an

d
su

st
ai

na
bl

e
(0

–3
0)

Br
oo

ki
ng
s
in
st
itu

tio
n6

in
de

x
of

st
at

e
w

ea
kn

es
s i

n
th
e
de

ve
lo

pi
ng

or
ld

(i
SW

)

it
en

ab
le
s t
he
id
en

tifi
ca

tio
n
of

po
te

nt
ia

l p
at

te
rn
s o
f s
ta
te

w
ea
kn
es
s,

ei
th

er
w

ith
in

og
ra

ph
ic

al
re

gi
on

s o
r a

cr
os

nc
tio

na
l a

re
as
b
y

ca
pt

ur
in

g
st
at
e
pe
rf
or
m
an
ce

a
cr

os
s i

fo
ur
b
as

ke
ts

o
f r

es
po

ns
ib

ili
ty

:
ec

on
om

ic
, p

ol
iti
ca
l,
se
cu
rit
y
an
d

w
el

fa
re

.
it
is
a
rg
ue
d
th
at
th
e
de
fin
iti
on

w
ea

k
st
at
es
c
on
si
de

w
ha

t a
re
c
om
m
on

pe
rc

ei
ve

d
as
th
e
co
re

fu
nc
tio

ns
o

f s
ta

te
ho

od
.

Tw
en

ty
in

di
ca
to
rs
, w
ith

fi
ve

in
di
ca
to
rs

fo
r e
ac
h

ba
sk

et
. W

ith
in
e
ac

h
ba

sk
et

,
th

e
in
di
ca

to
r s

co
re
s a
re

st
an

da
rd

is
ed

d
ag

gr
eg
at
ed

, c
re

at
in
g
in

di
vi

du
al

in
di
ca

to
r a

nd
b

as
ke

t s
co

re
s r

an
gi

fr
om

0
.0

(w
or

st
) t

o
10

.0
(b

es
t)

. T
he

ur
b

as
ke
t s
co

re
s a

re
a

ve
ra

ge
d

ob
ta

in
a

n
ov

er
al

l s
co

re
fo

r s
ta

w
ea
kn
es
s.
Th
e
sc
al
e
is

0
–1

0
(w

or
st

to
b

es
t)

. C
ou

nt
rie

s
ar

e
cl

as
si

fie
d

as
: ‘f

ai
le

d
st
at
es

’ (
th

re
e
w
ea

ke
st

c
ou
nt
rie

s)
; ‘c

rit
ic

al
ly

w
ea
k
st
at
es

’
(b

ot
to

m
ra

nk
q

ui
nt

ile
);

‘w
ea

k
st
at
es

’
(s

ec
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1298 I. A. FERREIRA

In most of them, rankings for each of the dimensions of fragility identified are also provided
alongside the ranking of countries according to the overall score.

Due to their emphasis on elements of state performance as well as conflict indicators,
other indices have also been considered as providing a measure of state fragility. These
include the State Weakness Index, part of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index; the Global
Peace Index; the Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger; the Political Instability Index; and the
indicators of Political Stability and Absence of Violence, part of the Worldwide Governance
Indicators.14 I refer to Fabra Mata and Ziaja, Gutierrez et al. and Gutierrez Sanin for more
extensive reviews.15

The CPIA is indisputably the most widely used as an indicator of fragility. Initiated in the
mid-1970s, the CPIA ratings were developed and used for allocation purposes, namely of
the resources from the International Development Association (IDA). It evolved since its
inception, undergoing a number of changes and adjustments over time. Currently the CPIA
aims to assess how favourable the policy and institutional framework of a country is to the
promotion of poverty reduction, sustainable growth, and the effective use of development
assistance. For that purpose, it considers 16 criteria grouped into four clusters: economic
management, structural policies, policies for social inclusion and equity, and public sector
management and institutions. Given its emphasis on policies and institutions, it provides
an indication of state performance.

According to many academics and development organisations, this makes the index
suitable as a measure of state fragility. It has been used by several organisations to define
the group of fragile states. The World Bank considered the score 3.2 a threshold below which
countries would be classified, first, as Low Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS), and from
2009 onward as ‘fragile states’. In 2011 the same institution adopted the designation of
‘fragile situations’ for countries with either a harmonised average CPIA country rating of
3.2 or less, or the presence of a United Nations (UN) and/or regional peace-keeping or
peace-building mission during the past three years.16 This index has also been used in some
academic analyses of fragile and failing states. McGillivray, and Feeny and McGillivray, con-
sider fragile states those countries belonging to the bottom two quintiles of the CPIA or
those not rated in the current CPIA rating exercise.17 Chauvet and Collier, and Chauvet,
Collier and Hoeffler, adopt a cut-off level of 2.5 for the CPIA, defining failing states as those
with a score below this threshold for at least four consecutive years.18 Bertocchi and
Guerzoni consider two alternative definitions of fragility, both based on the CPIA.19 However,
the rationale for using this particular threshold is not explicitly explained by either of these
institutions and authors.

More recently, several indices have been built with the specific aim of measuring state
fragility. The Fund for Peace institute has proposed a Fragile States Index (FSI), which is also
published by the Foreign Policy journal.20 It is used to provide a ranking of countries, which
are then categorised by score quartiles: alert (90–120), warning (60–90), stable (30–60), and
sustainable (0–30). The Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD-DAC) uses it to build its list of fragile states, which
results from the compilation of the list of countries based on the aforementioned harmonised
average of the CPIA scores (from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the
African Development Bank), and the countries of the FSI which are in the ‘alert’ and ‘warning’
categories.21 Alongside the CPIA, this is also one of the indices considered for the list of fragile
states used by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID).22

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 1299

The Brookings Institution built the Index of State Weakness in the Developing World (ISW).
It served as a basis to classify countries according to four categories: ‘failed states’ (three
weakest countries), ‘critically weak states’ (those in the bottom rank quintile), ‘weak states’
(those in the second rank quintile), and ‘states to watch’ (states with a significantly low score
in at least one of the four dimensions). However, the country rankings have only been pub-
lished for the year 2008.

In line with their work on fragile states, the research centres at Carleton University and
George Mason University also offer their own indices of fragility.23 Based on the conceptu-
alisation of fragility developed by Carment, Prest and Samy, the CIFP Fragility Index provides
an overall score of fragility, as well as disaggregated scores for authority, legitimacy and
capacity.24 This is the measure adopted by the Canadian International Development Agency
(CIDA). Researchers at George Mason University have built the State Fragility Index (SFI),
rooted in Marshal and Goldstone’s matrix of fragility, which serves as a basis for a ranking of
countries.25

Although less prominent in the debate on fragility, a few other indices are worth men-
tioning. First, I briefly introduce two additional indices that were not included in the previous
paragraphs due to lack of information. Even if not publicly available, the US Agency for
International Development (USAID) has its own ‘Alert List’ for Conflict and Instability, which
ranks 160 countries in order of fragility, based on their internally built index.26 It is known
that the underlying framework for this approach is provided by Goldstone et al., detailed
above, and that the operationalisation of the concept is based upon the proposals in ARD,
but no further details are provided.27 The second fragility index is the one underlying the
proposal of the Crisis State Research Centre. In Meeting the Challenges of Crisis States, refer-
ence is made to an aggregated index resulting from the variables included in their Monopoly
of Violence, Administration and Territorial Reach (MAT) database.28 This database and the
tools used in their quantitative analyses are described in detail elsewhere, but with no specific
description of this fragility index or its application.29

Despite not frequently being referred to in discussions of fragility indices, the State Failure
Problem Set, disclosed annually by the Political Instability Task Force (previously State Failure
Task Force), offers a data set of internal wars and failures of governance which includes data
since 1955 on four distinct types of state failure: revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, adverse
regime changes, and genocides and politicides.30 This measure differs from the ones
described in the previous paragraphs in its narrower focus on state collapse and its concep-
tually different approach to state failure. Two of the included variables, namely ‘failure of
state authority’ and ‘collapse of democratic institutions’, are more directly linked to the
described concepts. The first refers to situations in which central state institutions are weak-
ened to the point that authority or political order can no longer be maintained in significant
parts of the territory.31 The latter applies to situations in which autocratic political institutions,
through the use or threat of force, weaken or replace democratic or quasi-democratic
institutions.32

Finally, it is important to highlight the recent advances proposed in the OECD’s report
States of Fragility: Meeting Post-2015 Ambitions.33 The recognition of the need to consider
multidimensional approaches to state fragility along with a concern with designing a strategy
for post-2015 led to the suggestion of a new framework for identifying fragile states. This is
based on the disaggregation of fragility into five dimensions. Each dimension is proxied by
an index that results from the average of three normalised indicators and is designed to

1300 I. A. FERREIRA

measure goals drawn from Goal 16, which aims at promoting ‘peaceful and inclusive societies
for sustainable development’.34 They include the following fragility ‘lenses’: peaceful and
inclusive societies, access to justice, effective and accountable institutions, economic foun-
dations, and resilience.35

The focus on different dimensions of state fragility is common among existing proposals,
though from varied perspectives. Whereas some focus on the outcomes of state fragility in
different aspects, such as social, economic or political dimensions, others focus on the per-
formance of countries across state functions, such as capacity or legitimacy. I argue that the
latter should inform the operationalisation of the concept in order to avoid confusing causes
and consequences of state fragility. In the next section I examine their theoretical roots in
more detail.

Theoretical underpinnings of existing approaches

As pointed out by Bhuta, a key challenge of measuring state fragility is definitional.36 In fact,
the fuzziness of the term and the broadness and vagueness of current definitions are fre-
quently highlighted in critical appraisals. Given the complexity and multidimensionality of
state fragility, the discourse is frequently disconnected from the theoretical roots of the
concept, which has also led to the use of inappropriate tools to understand it.37

The construction of an index should be based on a sound working definition of the con-
cept. According to Goertz, it implies the identification of the concept as employed in theo-
retical propositions, as well as its constitutive dimensions, which will finally be measured by
appropriate indicators.38 A clear and grounded theoretical framework is essential to inform
the operationalisation of the concept. Not only does it identify the dimensions of state
fragility, which will in turn determine the indicators to be used, but it also establishes the
relationships between these dimensions, which will indicate the suitable aggregation pro-
cedure to obtain the measurement tool.

Bearing in mind the complexity of the concept of state fragility, completing these steps
can be particularly challenging. Existing proposals have been criticised for the lack of clarity
in the explanation of their theoretical basis39 – namely, the underlying theory of the state
– and for the fact that they overlook the distinction between symptoms, correlates and
causes of fragility.40 To help assess the approaches described in the previous sections, and
in light of the aforementioned framework, this section focuses on these two elements.

Apart from the CPIA, which was not specifically built as a measure of state fragility,41
existing proposals are based on a working definition of the concept. Common to these
definitions is a focus on the performance of the state in what are perceived to be its core
functions. However, there is some divergence in the identification of the key state functions,
as well as the capabilities that the state needs to have in order to perform them. Current
proposals can be divided broadly according to the latter element. One group of definitions
focuses on the effectiveness and legitimacy of the state as determinants of state strength
(in opposition to fragility), whereas others adopt a three-dimensional approach, which, with
some variation, draws upon the concepts of authority, legitimacy and capacity.42

The first group of definitions establishes the different functions associated with statehood,
and views the performance of the state in terms of its legitimacy and effectiveness. These
two dimensions are used in the approach proposed by Goldstone et al., which is also used
by USAID. According to these authors, the notion of fragile states encompasses, to different

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 1301

degrees, states that are ‘failing’, ‘in failure’, or ‘recovering from failure’.43 States can fail in either
of two senses: (1) ‘in the functional sense of losing the dominant role in enforcing law and
order in their territories’; and (2) ‘in the normative sense of failing at those tasks that we think
states should do: enforce justice and protect minorities, provide the conditions for economic
growth, cope with natural and humanitarian disasters’.44 The authors develop a matrix
intended to summarise the complexity of state capacity. This matrix is based on the assess-
ment of four dimensions of state–society relations – political, economic, social, and security
– in terms of effectiveness and legitimacy. According to Goldstone et al., the provision of
minimal public services is considered the bottom line of effectiveness.45 Although the con-
ceptualisation of these two dimensions is explored in detail, the underlying theoretical basis
is not always explicit.46

This approach is also followed by the Centre for Systemic Peace. The matrix of fragility
that forms the basis for their State Fragility Index assesses the country’s performance in
terms of effectiveness and legitimacy across the four dimensions mentioned above: security,
political, economic and social. According to their definition, fragility is closely linked with
the capacity of the state to ‘manage conflict; make and implement public policy; and deliver
essential services’ and also with ‘its systemic resilience in maintaining system coherence,
cohesion, and quality of life; responding effectively to challenges and crises, and sustaining
progressive development’.47 In order to achieve maximum stability, the state must exhibit
both effectiveness – ‘carry out the tasks expected of a competent government’ – and legit-
imacy – ‘by being perceived as just and fair in the manner it carries out those tasks’.48 However,
there is some lack of clarity in terms of the theory used to justify this view of the stable state.

Despite doing so less explicitly, Rice and Patrick draw upon related concepts.49 These
authors use the designation ‘weak states’, but describe similar characteristics. It is argued
that state weakness is measured according to the effectiveness in:

fostering an environment conducive to sustainable and equitable economic growth; establishing
and maintaining legitimate, transparent, and accountable political institutions; securing their
populations from violent conflict and controlling their territory; and meeting the basic human
needs for their population.50

These four elements are proxied by economic, political, security and social welfare indicators.
According to Rice and Patrick, this definition is intended to capture the government respon-
sibilities that are commonly considered as core state functions.51 However, the only allusion
to a theoretical appraisal of these functions is a footnote referring to two previous volumes
on the topic of state failure.52

The definitions in the second group provide a clearer description of the theoretical roots
of the concepts used. With some variation, they focus on three dimensions associated with
well-functioning states – authority, legitimacy and capacity – and the essential functions
are derived from them.

Carment et al. propose a definition of state fragility based on the assumption that ‘it is
the presence or absence of a functional government that distinguishes functional from
fragile and failed states’.53 Fragility measures the extent to which the actual practices and
capacities of the state for providing its basic functions differ from their ideal image, which
is the one reified in both state theory and international law.54 The authors argue that there
are three fundamental properties which reflect the functions of a state and its component
parts: (1) authority, which refers to the ‘ability to enact binding legislation over its population’
and ‘to provide a stable and secure environment’; (2) legitimacy, which reflects ‘the ability

1302 I. A. FERREIRA

of a state to command public loyalty to the governing regime, and to generate domestic
support for that government’s legislation and policy’; and, finally, (3) capacity, which refers
to ‘the power of a state to mobilise public resources towards productive ends’.55 The identi-
fication of these elements is based on the determinants of state strength listed by Gurr,
namely capacity, legitimacy, and the integrative role of the state.56 The theoretical grounding
for each of these three properties is described in more detail, namely with reference to the
Weberian definition of the state.

Call proposes a disaggregated approach to the problems posed by failed and fragile states
based on the analysis of gaps in three similar dimensions.57 The author argues that there is:
(1) a ‘legitimacy gap’ where the rules regulating the exercise of power and the accumulation
and distribution of wealth are rejected by a significant group of the state’s political elites
and society; (2) a ‘capacity gap’ where the institutions of a state lack the capability to deliver
minimal public goods and services to the population; and, finally, (3) a ‘security gap’ where
states do not provide minimal levels of security when confronted with organised armed
groups.58

By the same token, Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum’s notion of state fragility is based on
a vision of statehood as comprising three distinct, but interrelated, dimensions: authority,
capacity and legitimacy.59 Although recognising the similarity to Carment et al.’s definition,
their conceptualisation of these dimensions is closer to that of Call.60 Each of them is based
on a particular type of state–society relation, namely: (1) authority refers to the control of
violence by the state; (2) capacity concerns the provision of basic services to the citizens;
and (3) legitimacy is linked with the acceptance, or refusal to accept, by the society of the
state’s claim as the legitimate actor to set and enforce generally binding rules.61 Even if
referring to Call’s work and describing the three dimensions,62 some have found their justi-
fication for the choice of these dimensions as lacking in detail.63

Drawing upon a similar distinction between the dimensions of state fragility, Stewart and
Brown define fragile states ‘as states that are failing, or at risk of failing with respect to author-
ity, comprehensive service entitlements or legitimacy’.64 Although the core list of state func-
tions remains similar to those in the previous approaches, there is a distinction in terms of
the attributes of the state necessary to perform them. The authors consider comprehensive
basic service provision instead of state capacity, as they argue that service failures may result
from either lack of capacity or lack of will. In addition to that, Stewart and Brown introduce
an additional element of distinction between actual failure and risk of failure.65 The criteria
used to determine whether there is a failure in each of these dimensions are explained in
more detail. The ‘authority’ of the state is related to the protection from violence, whereas
‘legitimacy’ is linked with elements such as the democratic character of the regime and the
civil and political liberties. A comprehensive service provision includes health services, basic
education, water and sanitation, basic transport and energy infrastructure, and reduction
in income poverty. Still, unlike the aforementioned definitions, there is no explicit reference
to the theoretical underpinnings of the proposed definition and the three dimensions it
encompasses.

This overview indicates that, although there is a concern with clarifying the terms used
in the definitions and with identifying relevant proxies, in most cases, there is no reference
to the underlying theory of the state. Exceptions to this lack of clarity are Carment, Prest and
Samy, Call, and Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum, who dedicate more extensive sections to
explaining the theoretical roots of the focus on authority, legitimacy and capacity.66 However,

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 1303

neither of these works allows for the distinction between symptoms and causes of state
fragility, which, it is argued here, is essential for a better understanding of the complexity of
this phenomenon.

Conclusion

The aim of this paper has been to review current proposals to measure state fragility, focusing
on the underlying definitions of the concept and their theoretical underpinnings. In so doing,
some important caveats have been identified that can be overcome in future work. More
specifically, most existing approaches are undermined by a lack of solid theoretical founda-
tions, which leads to confusion between causes, symptoms and outcomes of state fragility.
Additionally, the present review offers a useful tool for policymakers by providing a summary
of existing measures and some clues for the search for improved instruments.

As highlighted above, some of the existing approaches are based on more thorough
theoretical considerations, whereas the foundations of others are weaker and deserve more
clarity. A few recent efforts have been made to provide theoretical models of state fragility.
For instance, focusing on late-century Africa, and referring to state failure, Bates provides a
model to determine the conditions for the prevalence of political order.67 It is argued that
there is a state when there is an equilibrium resulting from the choices that characterise that
political order, and the model derives the determinants of this equilibrium. Also, Besley and
Persson put forward a framework for analysing fragile states by exploring the origins of state
fragility, and, more specifically, how different factors contribute to different types of fragile
states.68 Both proposals offer useful starting points to derive hypotheses regarding the main
causes of state fragility, and to distinguish them from what are its dimensions, or pathologies,
using Besley and Persson’s terminology.69

One prominent aspect of some of the current approaches is their focus on different dimen-
sions of state fragility. However, considering the rankings of countries based on fragility
indices, they do not take into account this multidimensional character of the concept when
operationalising it (particularly when it comes to the choice of the aggregation procedure).
Recent views in the academic world warn of the fact that, by using additive indices to rank
countries according to a single aggregate measure, these proposals overlook the heteroge-
neity among fragile states.70 The donor community moves in a similar direction, drawing
attention to ‘the need for new approaches to assessing and monitoring fragility using metrics
that do not reduce fragility measures to a single index but rather allow for tracking multiple
(and potentially uncorrelated) dimensions’.71 However, with the exception of the recent sug-
gestions by Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum, and OECD, the call for departing from overall
scores has yet to inform existing indices.72 This proves even more relevant when one con-
siders that different types of fragility will require distinct forms of assistance. As expressed
in the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, there is an urgent need to improve the
effectiveness of the assistance to fragile states.73 Thus, a better understanding of the differ-
entiation between types of fragility is of crucial importance for policy decision-making.

Finally, a last remark is in order on the need to pursue better approaches to the measure-
ment of state fragility. Despite the criticism it has been subject to, the term still holds sway
over the development lexicon. Given its complexity and underlying political aspects, there
is a need to ‘tame the wickedness of the state fragility/failure problem set’74 by adopting a
term in common use while simultaneously examining the diversity of the phenomenon that

1304 I. A. FERREIRA

it assembles.75 This paper concurs with this view and hopes to inspire the pursuit of better
answers and to motivate further research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia under Grant
SFRH/BD/100811/2014.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Arjan Verschoor and Edward Anderson for their helpful comments and advice provided.
I also thank two anonymous referees for their insightful suggestions.

Notes

on Contributor

Ines A. Ferreira is a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia. Her research project
examines the impact of development aid in fragile states. She holds an MSc in political
economy of late development from the London School of Economics and Political Science
(UK), and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in economics from the University of Coimbra
(Portugal). Besides aid effectiveness, she is interested in the concept and measurement of
state fragility.

Notes

1. eg Cammack et al., “Donors and the ‘Fragile States’ Agenda”; Engberg-Pederson, Anderson and
Stepputat, “Fragile Situations”; and Bertoli and Ticci, “Fragile Guideline.”

2. Boege et al., “Building Peace”; and Nay, “Fragile and Failed States.”
3. Hameiri, “Failed States”; and Di John, “Concept, Causes and Consequences.” See also Milliken

and Krause, “State Failure”; Boas and Jennings, “Insecurity and Development”; Di John,
“Conceptualising the Causes and Consequences”; and, more recently, Ayers, “Illusion of the
Epoch”; and Hampel, “Dark(er) Side,” for critical analyses of the concept of state failure and the
ideology behind it.

4. Cammack et al., “Donors and the ‘Fragile States’ Agenda”; Hout, “Between Development and
Security”; Barakat and Larson, “Fragile States.”

5. Grimm, Lemay-Hebert and Nay, “Fragile States.” This is the introduction to a special issue on
fragile states. See the full issue for more detailed accounts of how the concept is used by
different development actors, from donor agencies to governments.

6. Brinkerhoff, “State Fragility.”
7. Fabra Mata and Ziaja, “User’s Guide”; Ziaja and Fabra Mata, “State Fragility Indices”; Wennmann,

“Grasping the Strengths of Fragile States”; and Gutierrez Sanin, “Evaluating State Performance.”
8. Gutierrez Sanin, “Evaluating State Performance.”
9. Similar arguments have been advanced before, for instance, in Besley and Persson, “Fragile

States”; and Lambach, Johais and Bayer, “Conceptualising State Collapse.”
10. Stewart and Brown, “Fragile States.”
11. Goldstone et al., “Strategy Framework.”
12. Call, “Beyond the ‘Failed State.’”

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 1305

13. Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum, “State Fragility.”
14. Fabra Mata and Ziaja, “User’s Guide.” The State Weakness Index was not considered given that

it is no longer provided as part of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, which now only
offers scores for the state of political and economic transformation as well as transformation
management.

15. Fabra Mata and Ziaja, “User’s Guide”; Ziaja and Fabra Mata, “State Fragility Indices”; Gutierrez
et al., “Measuring Poor State Performance”; and Gutierrez Sanin, “Evaluating State Performance.”

16. World Bank, “Harmonised List.” The term ‘harmonised’ refers to the averaging of the World
Bank CPIA scores with those of the African Development Bank and Asian Development Bank.

17. McGillivray, “Aid Allocation”; and Feeny and McGillivray, “Aid Allocation to Fragile States.”
18. Chauvet and Collier, “What Are the Preconditions”; and Chauvet, Collier and Hoeffler, “Paradise

Lost.”
19. Bertocchi and Guerzoni, “Fragile Definition”; and Bertocchi and Guerzoni, “Growth, History or

Institutions.”
20. Previous to 2014, this index was designated the Failed States Index.
21. See, for instance, OECD, “Fragile States 2013.”
22. DFID uses as a working definition of fragile states the following: ‘countries where the government

cannot or will not deliver core state functions to the majority of its people, including the poor’,
and its list of fragile states draws on the CPIA, the Failed States Index of the Fund for Peace,
and the Uppsala Conflict Database. Independent Commission for Aid Impact, “Assessing the
Impact,” 2.

23. Carment, Prest and Samy, “Fragile States Framework”; Marshal and Goldstone, “Global Report
on Conflict.”

24. Carment, Prest and Samy, “Fragile States Framework.”
25. Marshal and Goldstone, “Global Report on Conflict.”
26. Bhuta, “Measuring Stateness,” 7.
27. Goldstone et al., “Strategy Framework”; ARD, “Measuring Fragility.”
28. Putzel and Di John, “Meeting the Challenges,” 18.
29. Gutierrez et al., “Measuring Poor State Performance.”
30. Marshall, Gurr and Harff, “PITF Codebook 2014.”
31. Ibid., 12.
32. Ibid., 13.
33. OECD, States of Fragility 2015.
34. Ibid., 19.
35. Ibid., 104.
36. Bhuta, “Measuring Stateness,” 7.
37. See Faust, Gravingholt and Ziaja, “Foreign Aid,” for a discussion of the cognitive challenge

associated with identifying the causes of state fragility and with finding suitable instruments
to understand it.

38. Goertz, “Social Science Concepts,” 6–7.
39. Lambach, Johais and Bayer, “Conceptualising State Collapse.”
40. Besley and Persson, “Fragile States”; and Gutierrez Sanin, “Evaluating State Performance,” 21.

Besley and Persson also highlight that a conceptualisation based on a sound theory will enable
the distinction between endogenous and exogenous factors. Besley and Persson, “Fragile
States.”

41. For this reason, the analysis of this index is not included in this section.
42. This list of proposals does not make claims of completeness. The selection was made on the

basis of the aforementioned dimensions of state fragility, which appear to be the most common
among existing frameworks. For other, more extensive, lists of dimensions, I refer to Ghani,
Lockhart and Carnahan’s framework based on 10 functions for the modern sovereign state.
Ghani, Lockhart and Carnahan, “Closing the Sovereignty Gap.”

Additionally, Kaplan has proposed to categorise fragile states (or ‘political orders’, in the
terminology of the author) around four types, based on their level of political fragmentation
and government capacity. Kaplan, “Identifying Truly Fragile States.”

1306 I. A. FERREIRA

In a different account, but also using a multidimensional approach, the Crisis State Research
Centre proposes a definition of fragility based on four attributes of the state, which constitute
the basis for a fragility-to-resilience spectrum. Putzel and Di John, “Meeting the Challenges.”

43. Goldstone et al., “Strategy Framework.”
44. Ibid., 3.
45. Ibid.
46. Goldstone builds upon this approach and maps out different pathways of state failure.

Goldstone, “Pathways to State Failure.”
47. Marshall and Cole, “Global Report,” 51.
48. Marshall and Goldstone, “Global Report on Conflict,” 13–4.
49. Rice and Patrick, “Index of State Weakness.”
50. Ibid., 3.
51. Ibid., 8.
52. Patrick considers the same definition of state weakness and proposes a typology of seven

categories of countries, from ‘endemically weak states’ to ‘reform-minded governments’, based
not only on their current situation, but also on their trajectory. Patrick, “‘Failed’ States and
Global Security,” 651.

53. Carment et al., “2006 Country Indicators,” 5.
54. Carment, Prest and Samy, “Fragile States Framework,” 84.
55. Carment et al., “2006 Country Indicators,” 6–7.
56. Cited in Carment, Prest and Samy, “Fragile States Framework,” 83–4.
57. Call, “Beyond the ‘Failed State.’”
58. Ibid., 306–8.
59. Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum, “State Fragility”; and Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum,

“Disaggregating State Fragility.”
60. Carment et al., “2006 Country Indicators”; Call, “Beyond the ‘Failed State.’”
61. Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum, “Disaggregating State Fragility,” 1290–2.
62. Call, “Beyond the ‘Failed State.’”
63. Lambach, Johais and Bayer, “Conceptualising State Collapse,” 1301.
64. Stewart and Brown, “Fragile States,” 3.
65. Ibid.
66. Carment, Prest and Samy, “Fragile States Framework”; Call, “Beyond the ‘Failed State’”; and

Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum, “State Fragility.”
67. Bates, “Logic of State Failure.”
68. Besley and Persson, “Fragile States.”
69. Ibid.
70. Zulueta-Fulscher, “Democracy-Support Effectiveness.”
71. OECD, States of Fragility 2015, 45.
72. Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum, “State Fragility”; Gravingholt, Ziaja and Kreibaum,

“Disaggregating State Fragility”; and OECD, States of Fragility 2015.
73. This agreement was signed in Busan in 2011 by the G7 and the group of 19 fragile and conflict-

affected countries, development partners, and international organisations. International
Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, “New Deal.”

74. Brinkerhoff, “State Fragility,” 337.
75. Gisselquist, “Varieties of Fragility,” 1272.

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Abstract

Introduction
Overview of existing measures
No ranking or partial rankings of fragile states
Proposals providing overall rankings of fragile states
Theoretical underpinnings of existing approaches
Conclusion
Disclosure statement
Funding
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributor
Notes
Bibliography

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