ABSTRACT
Over the past half-decade, three logics, supported by powerful intellectual and political constituencies, have converged to elevate fragile states and statebuilding on the international agenda. The humanitarian motivation, oldest of these logics, emphasizes the human and international costs of internal conflict and genocide. Humanitarian concentration on short-term, apolitical relief of human suffering was transformed during the 1990s to include attention to longer-term-and intensely political-causes of internal conflict, particularly weak institutions. A second logic for statebuilding emerged from concern with economic
development among the poorest countries. The economic consequences of violent internal conflict became clear: “development in reverse” (Collier 2007: 27). Good governance was closely linked with effective use of foreign aid and successful economic development. This new emphasis on institutional criteria for targeting aid threatened to marginalize fragile and failed states, however. New forms of international engagement with those states were required to avoid punishing poorly-governed societies, whose populations were among the most economically deprived in the world. Finally, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 reoriented US and
NATO security policy toward risks emanating from territories that were not effectively policed. Afghanistan, a neglected and chaotic backwater since the end of the ColdWar, had become a key base for al-Qaeda. International public “bads” of all kinds, from infectious disease to refugee flows, were linked to failed states. Widespread skepticism toward interventionist “social work” during the 1990s quickly changed to statebuilding as a strategic necessity.2
