Fragile States, Great Power Competition and Development Assistance in Africa (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Foreign Aid and NGOs in Developing Countries

Abstract

In December 2019 Congress passed and President Trump signed into law the Global Fragility Act, long advocated by peacebuilding practitioners and viewed by them as a “game-changing way forward to prevent and reduce violent conflict” by creating “the first-ever comprehensive U.S. government strategy to tackle and prevent spiraling global conflict.” (Alliance for Peacebuilding 2020). Shortly afterwards, the World Bank Group released its new Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020-2025. For many years now, the donor community has prioritized assistance to states classified as fragile due to their poverty, weak governance and internal often violent conflicts. Yet, as the World Bank pointed out, despite years of assistance, “the global fragility landscape has worsened significantly,” with more violent conflicts today than in the past 30 years (World Bank 2020). How do we account for these poor results?

Donor assistance to fragile states has generated significant scholarly and policy interest and there are varied explanations for why the assistance to fragile states has not produced desired results. Here, I do not contest these diagnoses. Rather I argue that a key reason that the academic and policy communities have failed to adequately account for this lackluster record is that they have paid insufficient attention to the authority and agency of fragile states themselves. In particular, I argue that by bringing consideration of the authority and agency of fragile states into the discussion, we can more fully understand how, why and in what ways these states shape donor interventions. Far from being passive recipients of development and security aid, as often assumed, these states have been able to shape frameworks governing assistance to fragile states and to negotiate assistance provision with donors. The strategies fragile states have deployed have been varied, reflecting the diversity of political, economic, and social institutions in these states, distinct historical and developmental experiences, political ideologies, strategic importance to donors and the growing competition among western and emerging donors, such as China, Russia, and India. Some states have embraced the fragility label, viewing it as an effective tactic for attracting aid. Others have eschewed. Here, I examine Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Uganda and demonstrate how these states have used their agency to shape the impacts and effectiveness of international assistance.

I argue that there are four factors that need to be considered to understand these differences. First, particular historical experiences with external interventions affects how states respond to the state fragility label and how that in turns shapes their engagement with international debates about assistance frameworks and with donors. Second, the way states frame their own development trajectories and how these framings affect the choices they make when engaging with donors. Third, when and how political elites decide to strategically adopt the fragility framework to promote their international and domestic political interests. Finally, how the strategic location of states and the emergence of new donors who reject the fragility framing has provided fragile states with a greater political latitude to chart their own course within the current development assistance landscape. Drawing on the insights of the burgeoning literature on African agency (Mwambar, Munyi, Ylonen 2020), I argue that depending on how these four factors combine, the states pursue different strategies when engaging with international donors. Uganda has selectively embraced the fragility label, while not joining g7+ group of fragile states. It has used it to translate western donor concerns about potential regional spillover of violent conflict in parts of the country into securing additional resources. The Museveni regime relied on this aid to maintain the political status quo. Ethiopia with its lack of history of colonial domination, a well-developed state bureaucracy, clear vision of its development project, strategic location in the Horn of Africa and multiple donors, including emerging donors, willing to provide funds has rejected the fragility label. It has been able to position itself as regional power to secure aid. Both Sierra Leone and Liberia, on the other hand, emerged from civil wars devasted, had weak state institutions, relatively few natural resources that would attract foreign investors, and little strategic value but were in need of external assistance. Consequently, both embraced the fragility label, becoming members of the g7+ group as a strategy to more effectively advocate for additional resources. These differing characteristics of the four states also translated into divergent capabilities to shape how allocated assistance programs were implemented, with Uganda and Ethiopia able to influence these processes to a much greater extent than Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Author

• Agnieszka Paczynska, George Mason University