Fragility, Aid, and State-building

Taylor & Francis

Fragile states pose major development and security challenges. Considerable international resources are therefore devoted to state-building and institutional strengthening in fragile states, with generally mixed results. This volume explores how unpacking the concept of fragility and studying its dimensions and forms can help to build policy-relevant understandings of how states become more resilient and the role of aid therein. It highlights the particular challenges for donors in dealing with \u2018chronically\u2019 (as opposed to \u2018temporarily\u2019) fragile states and those with weak legitimacy, as well as how unpacking fragility can provide traction on how to take \u2018local context\u2019 into account. Three chapters present new analysis from innovative initiatives to study fragility and fragile state transitions in cross-national perspective. Four chapters offer new focused analysis of selected countries, drawing on comparative methods and spotlighting the role of aid vers.