Abstract
ABSTRACTFor the past four years, the Fund for Peace has ranked the Central African Republic, Somalia and South Sudan as the ‘most fragile states’ in the world, in its annual Fragile States Index (FSI). The three countries’ almost identical scores suggest comparability; however, critics raise concerns about the FSI's data aggregation methods, and its conflation of causes and consequences. This article treads the uncharted path of unpacking the empirical realities that hide behind FSI indicators. Drawing on data collected during field research in the three states, the authors investigate three security indicators (security apparatus, factionalized elites, and external intervention) and propose an alternative, qualitative appreciation. Each country's fragility is based on how security forces, elites and interventions evolved over time and installed themselves differently in each region of the country. The qualitative assessment presented here shows that not every indicator matters in all cases at all times or throughout the country. Most crucially, the authors unveil enormous differences between and within the FSI's three ‘most fragile states’. Such variations call for better‐adapted and more flexible intervention strategies, and for quantitative comparisons to be qualitatively grounded.
Highlights
Ranked alongside each other, the Central African Republic (CAR), Somalia and South Sudan share the dubious honour of being the world’s ‘most fragile states’ according to the Fragile States Index (FSI) (Messner et al, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017)
Using the three FSI security indicators as the basis of this comparative analysis of the three ‘most fragile states’, we show how the temporal and spatial variations between and within the three countries affect fragility and explain what this tells us about the value of the FSI as a policy-development tool
External interventions impact internal fragility and are installed as a consequence of a country’s fragility. This confounding of cause and consequence might explain why the FSI fails to grasp drastic changes such as (1) the immense enlargement of the peacekeeping mission in the CAR from under 1,000 peacekeepers at the onset of the crisis (FSI at 9.4) to almost 12,000 in 2015 (FSI at 9.5); and (2) the alleged stabilization of Somalia by 0.6 points following the integration of its perceived arch-enemy Ethiopia into the African Union (AU) mission on 1 January 2014
Summary
Ranked alongside each other, the Central African Republic (CAR), Somalia and South Sudan share the dubious honour of being the world’s ‘most fragile states’ according to the Fragile States Index (FSI) (Messner et al, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017). Heavy correlation of different indices due to similar data pools (Mata and Ziaja, 2009: 29; Ziaja, 2012) allows the critique of the FSI’s measurement and applicability for policy to stand for other rankings We use these indicators to develop an alternative, qualitative assessment in which we offer insights into the temporal and spatial differences in each of the three countries. Drawing on the FSI’s three security indicators, we show that the nature of ‘fragility’ in each of the three worst-scoring countries varies greatly despite the similarity suggested by the FSI rankings This contribution assesses the indicators ‘security sector’, ‘factionalized elites’, and ‘external interventions’ to unmask the lack of likeness and show why simplification — arguably one of the FSI’s merits — is, at times, wrong. Thereby, we urgently discourage the use of international blueprint approaches in response to different types of fragility settings
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