ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the international background of state collapse in the third world, its implications especially with regard to humanitarian emergencies and the new international regime of political conditionality and co-operation with non-state actors as responses to the situation. It discusses the political conditionality and cooperation with collapsed states under the Lome convention, which is an intergovernmental agreement between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. The social and humanitarian consequences of state collapse can be drastic. The post-cold war era has also been an era of humanitarian emergencies. The end of the cold war raised expectations that the ideological division of the world and self-interested involvement of superpowers would be replaced by new global thinking enabling humanitarian intervention. Political considerations played a prominent role during the cold war. Then conditionality was often based on ideological divisions in the line of superpower confrontation.
