The Finnish Institute for International Affairs (FIIA) and Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) published the report Addressing state fragility in Africa, written by Louise Wiuff Moe.

Western donor policies directed towards ‘peace as state-building’ in Africa have not had the desired effect in terms of creating stability, development and human prosperity. The gap between donor rhetoric and empirical realities is widening. Hence, there is a need for a critical rethinking of approaches to peace and state-building.

Moe´s report starts from the premise that in order to direct external support to fragile states with the aim of advancing constructive change and development, it is necessary to start focusing on what is there rather than clinging to the notion of what ought to be there, looking from a liberal-democracy perspective.

The report discusses the logic of the interaction between donors and domestic state-labelled elites and how so-called ‘fragile states’ also feature innovative locally devised systems of non-state and hybrid governance and various grounded capacities for peace and order.

The report states that discussions of ‘what is there’ should not only further the understanding of malign domestic dynamics that undermine participation, socio-economic development and state accountability, but also draw attention to the significance of the local forces that provide protection, predictability and survival for the population in settings with limited statehood.  Such locally grounded non-state agency and mechanisms of recovery and order have been less extensively addressed in the literature on political science and International Relations theory although they are of great significance for understanding the empirical conditions for political order and peace.

Download the report from FIIA´s website.