Over the last decade, Western government agencies and international organizations have increasingly turned their attention to the issue of state ‘fragility’ and ‘failure’ in developing countries that are confronted with war, violence and extreme poverty. They have presented this issue as a major international policy challenge in the fields of security and development assistance. Policy analysts and scholars have also played an instrumental role in the dissemination and legitimization of the two concepts. This article disputes the analytical underpinning of this new research agenda. It argues that the concepts of fragile and failed states are confusing, inherently superficial and unstable policy-oriented labels. First, it elaborates five critical ideas concerning the scientific dimension of this literature. Second, it interprets the analytical framework of fragile/failed states as a reactivation of developmentalist theories, primarily driven by a Western conception of the polity. Third, it encourages the rejection of the state-centric approach to security and development in fragile contexts, and advocates combining interest in government institutions with a multidimensional, context-based and historically grounded approach to society-wide vulnerabilities.
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