Fragile Strategies: Getting Pandemic Response Right in Fragile States

Abstract

Fragile Strategies: Getting Pandemic Response Right in Fragile States1 Blaise Misztal (bio) This article was contributed to Forum—the edition’s portfolio of thematic content—by GJIA’s Global Governance section Crises, conventional wisdom holds, are the only way to jolt our divided, distracted, and dawdling political system into action. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the world’s fragile states, however, policy responses prompted by the current crisis might actually prove counterproductive. Almost as soon as it became clear in the spring of 2020 that the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus was becoming a global pandemic, alarm bells began ringing among experts who study and work in fragile contexts. Fragility is a political condition best understood as affecting low- or middle-income states—or sub-state regions—that are, or are at risk of becoming, engulfed in political instability or conflict as a result of “deficits of institutional capacity and political legitimacy.”2 The World Bank currently includes thirty-six areas in its list of “Fragile and Conflict-affected Situations.”3 Yet, according to available data, fragile states were recording far fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths than other developing but non-fragile countries, let alone the developed world. This does not mean that the experts were wrong or that the COVID-19 pandemic is not ravaging these countries. Indeed, regardless of its effects on public health—which might be far greater than limited testing data reveals—COVID-19’s second-order economic, social, and political consequences are already severe and threaten to be long-lasting for fragile states. However, these early concerns about fragile states—and the resulting donor response focused on broad health and humanitarian assistance— contradict most of what is known about fragility and how to deal with it. In the last several years, a consensus has emerged in United States and across multilateral institutions—within governmental and non-governmental organizations alike and now captured in recent US legislation and official strategy documents4—on how to address the challenge of fragility. This approach focuses upon individually tailored, long-term preventive engagements designed around building political comity, not through crisis-driven humanitarian assistance or technical capacity building. Yet, these lessons are being sparingly applied—if at all—to the challenge that COVID-19 poses to fragile states. In short, COVID-19 risks not only decimating fragile states but also undoing the progress that has been made in rethinking policy responses to fragility. An unpredictable pandemic In the spring of 2020 and as Europe and the United States were in various stages of lockdown, David Miliband, the former British Foreign Minister and current head of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), warned that “the full, devastating and disproportionate weight of this pandemic has yet to be felt in the world’s most fragile and war-torn countries.”5 The IRC estimated that there could be “between 500 million and 1 billion coronavirus infections, leading to between 1.7 to 3.2 million deaths” in the thirty-four predominantly fragile countries within which the agency works.6 Available data shows that—thus far—this worst-case scenario has not come to pass. As of [End Page 29] January 29, 2021, total worldwide reported COVID-19 infections stood at roughly 102 million, with deaths at 2.2 million. Though there are concerns about the accuracy of that data, fragile states have reported far lower infection and mortality rates than other developing and even developed countries. In the thirty-six areas categorized as fragile by the World Bank, the total number of infections (as of early December 2020) was 1.25 million—with just over 27,000 deaths. Taken together, fragile states average 227 total infections and five total deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, rates that are an order of magnitude lower than the United States—where those figures stand at 4,638 and 88, respectively.7 Even more remarkable is that fragile states in Africa (twenty out of the thirty-six states designated as fragile by the World Bank)—and indeed the continent as a whole—have fared much better than expected. In June, the head of Africa Centers for Disease...