STATE fragility in developing nations has traditionally been examined as a purely domestic concern, operating away from the global winds of change. This has usually been considered in the context of weak or contested leadership, and the debilitation of the capacity of states to deliver services to their people.

Many hypotheses have been put forward, though, and by no means has a consensus over a definition evolved yet.

One of the more widely accepted definitions has been given by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Europe, which suggests that states are fragile when state structures lack political will and/or the capacity to provide the basic functions needed for poverty reduction, development and to safeguard the security and human rights of their populations.

However, this shows one end of the spectrum only; lacking is the role of the manner in which political elites settle their differences or how the state interacts with and in turn affects the citizens. Also excluded from this definition is how the capacity, authority and legitimacy of state institutions translates to the society they govern. In short, this definition misses out on how state authority needs to be translated into the legitimacy of state institutions in a manner that is acceptable to the society they govern.

Most studies have focused on how political settlement amongst political elites factors into the state-building theory, while state fragility is frequently considered a product of state capacity and its authority or legitimacy to govern. Though not exhaustive, the fragility indices range from various factors such as the state’s ability to exercise a monopoly over the legitimate use of force to the state’s failure to develop bureaucratic capacity.

The capacity of the bureaucracy is generally measured by progress towards achieving a monopoly over, for instance, legitimate taxation. Other factors are the failure of its institutions to compete with non-state institutions, the absence of territorial control, authority to protect citizens, capacity to provide basic services and the legitimacy of its governance structures. Yet the definition debate rages on.

The main problem is that these definitions are mainly seen at a retrogressive level. State capability is analysed when structures are breaking down, and then a retrospective study is conducted to measure how these structures broke down. A frequent result of such backward-looking tendencies has been to produce results on what happened before capacity broke down.

Thus these diagnoses are largely symptomatic in the sense that social scientists will only start looking for clues to what happened when a state enters a fragile state. These cannot then be used as predictors of state fragility, for instance, in order to diagnose states that may enter such a fragile phase at a given time; every state has its own dynamics.

Thus, largely, when social scientists say that a state is fragile, what they mean is that they think so based on studies on other states which have become fragile through similar shared experiences. This is not wholly accurate because each state has its own dynamics, cultures, value systems and inertias.

There is another problem with the predicates of state fragility put forward by social science pundits; they often place the onus on an examination of the state’s performance and remedial action to improve it, rather than any great or exhaustive predictions of the wider factors limiting its authority, most importantly international pressures. Thus, when all one looks at is the capacity of domestic institutional institutions, one risks ignoring the critical international factors that sometimes challenge a state’s ability to sustain the very concept of the territorial state — in particular the way these factors limit a state’s ability to maintain a purely development-oriented stance.

The dominant western idea of development places the state at the heart of social and economic progress, yet this concept cannot be treated in isolation from pressure groups that challenge this notion. Separatism, terrorism, criminality or conflict, to name just a few, impact state actors in sustaining their role as the dominant drivers for social development. Thus, this notion of placing a nation-state at the heart of the development engine is sometimes inaccurate to some extent.

The dominance of global treaties, conflicts and institutions are the hallmark of this century and the last. Ineffective some of them may be, but one cannot deny the fact that it is no longer accurate to treat international pressures from these as superfluous.

Also, the proliferation of multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF or other regulatory bodies means that states often adjust or align money — the main driver for social change — along lines that are not necessarily congruent with state policies. Thus, at any given time, there are a wide range of issues acting at the global, regional and localised levels which impact on a state’s capacity to make decisions, some of which may affect their own citizens.

One way to regulate this international environment is to deny the effect or attempt to minimise it upon a state by its ruling elite, which has its own repercussions in the form of violated agreements, refused loans or sanctions.

A political economy approach is often a better route to understanding this phenomenon, since it will focus on interactions between the capacity and capability of ruling elites in determining how states will respond to international pressures while also factoring in the domestic relationships mentioned above.

The problem is that domestic factors are often intertwined with international factors. A right-wing elite role by an opposing entity, for example, may be the result of the behaviours of a left-wing ruling entity acting in a certain way in response to international pressures.

Thus, even when there are no international factors being considered, domestic factors may still be a result of how international pressures have shaped responses to a certain stimulus by elites locked in a power struggle. Since the elites may change roles, with opposition elites becoming ruling elites, there is still a chance that no matter what priorities a state may place for social development, some drivers may be discarded in this power struggle on a purely ideological basis.

Since international pressures are often resilient towards the policy stance of a state, the very fact that domestic factors are affected by international ones makes some states very resistant to change aimed at social development.

The writer is a security analyst.