ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief historical sociology, or rather, a historical sociological argument about numerical composition. It explains how powerful the quantifying practices came to be in the merging of conflict and development issues that culminated in the fragile states agenda. The chapter discusses how the World Bank and OECD adapted to the topic of state fragility while measuring and ordering it, as well as how these practices of quantification became increasingly associated with the very definition of fragile states as countries where conflict and development concerns converge. The historical sociology of quantification, fragility and the development-conflict merge has sought so far to show how measuring state fragility became a circular exercise, where fragile states are constantly composed by measurable features, as donors move on to indicators they can build and measure, even if the results produced are known to be imperfect.
