The security-development nexus and fragile states: a critical political analysis

Abstract

At least since the mid-1980s the concept of security (not un-controversially) has been broadened to include a wider set of non-military issues, and deepened to account for referents both above and below the state, in particular to consider individuals, regions and other non-state groups. Analyses of insecurity came to focus on: 1) a host of ʼnew’ threats to global order, including terrorism, transnational crime, migration, environmental degradation and disease; and 2) the human experience, including questions of underdevelopment, poverty and human insecurity. With the broadening and deepening of the concept of security, especially in the post-Cold War era, Critical Security Studies (CSS) gained prominence, and human security perspectives also gathered scholarly and institutional recognition. However, these critical approaches were soon to be challenged by the revival of more traditional conceptions of security, albeit in ways that incorporated what were also critical development concerns of critical security approaches into a more orthodox analytical framework. It is this framework that informs international institutional policy approaches to security and development. This chapter examines this, and focuses in particular on how efforts at bridging security and development concerns have concentrated on so-called fragile states. The latter have been perceived as both a source of threats and a condition of insecurity and underdevelopment, thus warranting international attention on both moral and humanitarian grounds, as well as for the purposes of protecting national, regional and global security. For example, Rotberg (2003: 24) has cautioned: Preventing nation-states from failing, and resuscitating those that have failed and will fail, have thus become the critical, all-consuming, strategic and moral imperatives of our terrorized time.