Stabilising Fragile States
Abstract
Sobered by the enormous cost in lives, budgets, effort, time, and popular support that stabilisation operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have incurred, international enthusiasm for engaging in other fragile states is limited. This, coupled with the complex political, economic, and social undercurrents of fragile states, has led some to question whether stabilisation is genuinely needed or even feasible. They argue it would be more realistic to narrow the focus to targeting the key troublemakers in these contexts, leaving it up to local actors to deal with stabilisation. In fact, this approach was tried for much of the past twenty years in Somalia--and the last several decades in Afghanistan--and elsewhere. Not only did these parochial efforts fail (not least because targeting destabilising actors requires excellent intelligence that can be gained only from being on the ground), but these countries have since grown more unstable--and dangerous. Often lost in this discussion is that the track record of stabilising fragile states over the past two decades has yielded a number of relative successes, including Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Croatia, Kosovo, East Timor, El Salvador, and Colombia. While all are still works in progress, each of these countries is immeasurably better off--and poses less of a threat to its neighbours and the global community--because of international stabilisation efforts. Better to accept that stabilising fragile states is a collective challenge of the contemporary international security era and to learn from the wealth of experience gained in recent decades so as to make these undertakings as effective and efficient as possible. Indeed, there are currently peacekeeping operations in fourteen of the twenty-eight most fragile states--and other forms of stabilisation under way in most of the others--that would benefit from these insights.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA589401
Entities
People
- Joseph Siegle
Organizations
- National Defense University