The afterlives of state failure: echoes and aftermaths of colonialism

Abstract

This article offers a new perspective on the failed states agenda, and the reconfiguration of colonial discourse buttressing it, by theorising its afterlives. The concept of afterlives has mostly been discussed as a metaphor or in passing in the IR literature. Drawing from the post- and decolonial literature, we propose to define the concept simultaneously as echoes and aftermaths of the past. This conceptualisation of afterlives aims to contribute to the study of the persistence of colonial forms beyond notions of continuity and rupture. We develop the concept of afterlives through a discussion of the failed states agenda and its iterations. We discuss four specific iterations of the agenda: the genesis of the agenda in the decolonisation period; the consolidation of the agenda during the early 1990s; the crisis of the agenda and the rise of the resilience discussion; and finally the rise of the fragile city agenda as one of the afterlives of the failed states agenda. To illustrate our argument, we discuss two specific ‘fragments’ through which we can effectively grasp the echoes and aftermaths of coloniality: the pathologisation of fragile states and cities, operated through various twin figures (civilised/barbaric; strong/dysfunctional; resilient/vulnerable) and their practical repercussions; and the visualisation, mapping and colour-coding of fragile states and cities, exemplifying the durability and contradictions of the failed states agenda.

‘You want me to tell you about myself as if I have a complete story but all I have are fragments which are snagged by troubling gaps, things I would have asked about if I could, moments that ended too soon or were inconclusive’.

(Gurnah, 2021: 206)

Introduction

The concept of state failure and its multiple iterations (Grimm et al., 2014; Gros, 1996) ¹ is still alive and well, despite multiple prognoses of its imminent demise. After a heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s, a coalition of scholars have noted that the concept has lost any utility and should be abandoned altogether, both from a political realist standpoint (Mazarr, 2014) or from more critical perspectives (Call, 2008; Gruffydd Jones, 2013; Hill, 2005; Nay, 2013). Faced with the ‘failure of the failed states debate’ (Hagmann and Hoehne, 2009), or confronted with a ‘failed paradigm’ (Hameiri, 2007), some note that the concepts of fragile and failed states are ‘on the wane’, ‘destined to be replaced in the future’ (Nay, 2013: 338; see also Ezrow and Frantz, 2013: 1335; Mazarr, 2014). Because of all its shortcomings, the notion of state failure ‘should be dispensed with as a theoretical concept’ (Eriksen, 2011: 235), or ‘rejected’ (Gruffydd Jones, 2013: 186). However, concepts, norms or ideas do not die easily (see, for instance, Percy and Sandholtz, 2022; Quiggin, 2010). To the contrary, a concept like state failure is politically malleable, useful to powerful actors as a prescriptive term justifying interventionary practices (Bilgin and Morton, 2002: 66; Bøås and Jennings, 2005; Clausen and Albrecht, 2022; Lemay-Hébert, 2019). Despite the critique, the agenda has persevered, outliving its fatal prognostics.

In this article, we interrogate the persistence and durability, as well as contradictions, of particular assumptions underpinning the failed states agenda. The failed states agenda refers here to a distinct body of literature presenting a specific set of arguments about failed states (for similar approaches, see Hill, 2005; Rocha de Siqueira, 2022; Stepputat and Engberg-Pedersen, 2008; Woodward, 2017), connecting theory and practice through an epistemic community of practice (Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu, 2014). ² As captured by Klaus Schlichte, ‘think tanks and organic intellectuals – in the Gramscian sense of the word – have produced a new discourse that simultaneously dominates the academic thinking on policies within the OECD and accompanies new forms of interventions’ (Schlichte, 2005: viii). We unpack the various iterations of the failed states agenda by developing a theoretical framework around the concept of afterlives. The notion of afterlives has received increased attention in recent International Relations (IR) scholarship (e.g. Odysseos, 2019), drawing on a burgeoning body of work in cognate disciplines, particularly from post- and decolonial perspectives (Salem, 2020). This scholarship has made a number of crucial contributions, underlining the persisting impacts of imperial, anticolonial, modern and developmental projects in the present. ³ Going beyond the analysis of specific policies, the concept of afterlives seeks to reframe projects ‘as living, complex, and non-linear processes that outstrip official timelines’ and ‘formal life cycles’ (Gez, 2021: 1511–1512). Despite being increasingly mentioned in IR scholarship (Danewid, 2019; Finiguerra, 2023; Khalili, 2017; Lee, 2010; Rao, 2018; Rutazibwa, 2020; Sylvester, 2013), the meaning of the concept is often assumed rather than explicitly theorised. We argue that a more detailed theorisation of the concept helps to flesh out key concerns relating to the coloniality of global politics (Gani and Marshall, 2022; Rutazibwa, 2020; Tucker, 2018), a topic increasingly central to the study of IR, by helping to move beyond common narratives regarding the continuity/discontinuity of colonial formations in the context of failed states. We develop a multifaceted understanding of afterlives as simultaneously echoes and aftermaths, expanding specifically on the permutations through which the past lives on. This framework is then employed in order to sketch the iterations through which the failed states agenda has developed over time.

We focus empirically on one particular afterlife of the failed states agenda, which has received limited attention in the IR literature: the fragile cities agenda. The changing nature of approaches to failed states could quite easily be taken as symptomatic of the transition from modern to postmodern forms of intervention, and a move away from modern/colonial rationalities. To a certain extent this explanation carries some purchase. However, in this article, we argue that a different story emerges if we trace the afterlives of the failed states agenda through the fragile cities agenda, focusing particularly on how fragments of the various iterations of the agenda are rearticulated. The fragile cities agenda, most clearly articulated by Robert Muggah (along with affiliates from Igarapé Institute in Brazil), is clear about the willingness to expand the remit of the failed states agenda beyond the exclusive domain of states (Muggah and Savage, 2012), as such projecting the agenda onto a local scale and extending interventionary practices to areas previously inaccessible to interventions (Miklos and Paoliello, 2017: 556; Moulin Aguiar and Tabak, 2015). By analysing the afterlives of modern notions of state failure through the fragile cities agenda, we are able to provide insight into contemporary genealogies of security and development by underlining the persistence of colonial forms.

The article is structured in three main parts. In the first section, we develop a theoretical understanding of the notion of afterlives, identifying two interrelated dimensions of afterlives: immaterial echoes and material aftermaths. In the second section, building on this conceptualisation of afterlives, we outline the various iterations through which the failed states agenda has operated, pointing to the disruption and continuity of modernistic notions through four distinct moments of the life and afterlives of the failed states agenda. These points in time are not linear moments of history, even if historicity in the debate and practical reflexivity do have a role to play, but four specific iterations and configurations of the agenda. As such, we build on previous historicisation of the concept (Bueger and Bethke, 2014; Migdal and Schlichte, 2005; Woodward, 2017) to offer a different and complementary reading of the evolution of the failed state agenda, in line with contributions around the ‘historicity’ of the IR discipline and the understanding that ‘the past is not over’ (Schlichte and Stetter, 2023: 5; see also Bukovansky et al., 2023; de Carvalho, Costa López, and Leira, 2020). The first iteration discusses the genesis of the failed states agenda through a specific reading of decolonisation. The second iteration looks at the consolidation of the agenda in the early 1990s. The third moment looks at the crisis of the agenda in the 2010s, where modernistic tones are marginalised, and the critique co-opted, to favour more fluid understandings of ‘fragile situations’. The fourth moment highlights the appearance of the ‘fragile cities’ agenda. The fragile cities agenda represents both the continuation of certain elements of the first iteration of the failed states agenda while also borrowing from the later iteration of fragility. In the final section, we look at two distinct fragments – to borrow directly from Gurnah’s conceptualisation – of the failed states agenda, made visible through the theorisation of afterlives: (1) the pathologisation of fragile states and cities, and the different permutations of these manifestations through iterations of the failed states agenda; and (2) the mapping and listing of fragile states and cities, that deploy very explicit colour codes, and exemplify the continuation and contradictions of the failed states agenda.

Afterlives: the echoes and aftermaths of colonialism in IR

In his novel Afterlives, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Abdulrazak Gurnah provides insight into how the past lives on in the present. This past does not show itself fully formed but rather appears as ‘fragments which are snagged in troubling gaps’, as the quote at the beginning of this article underlines. In the aftermath of imperial conflict, the main characters are afflicted by physical injuries and trauma. Gurnah’s portrayal of the character Ilyas in particular captures the afterlives of a fragmented past in the present. While Ilyas appears in the flesh only at the beginning of the story – when he leaves to join the schutztruppe, the German colonial troops, to fight against the British – his presence continues to haunt the characters of the story throughout, and particularly his sister Afiya. With no news from Ilyas since his departure, Afiya lives in constant expectation of his return, even years after the war has ended. The trauma of his absence takes on intergenerational dimensions through Afiya’s son, also named Ilyas, who is temporarily possessed by an unfamiliar grieving woman’s voice searching for Ilyas senior. By contacting the wife of a Lutheran pastor in Germany, Afiya’s husband Hamza, in an effort to free his son of this torment, is later able to discover that Ilyas senior moved there after the war. Ilyas junior, relieved of the voice, is then able to reconstruct parts of his story from archival fragments as a student in Germany. Most remarkably, he encounters a photo of Ilyas in schutztruppe uniform marching with the Nazi Party organisation Reichskolonialbund, that sought the return of Germany’s colonies. Through the two Ilyas’ in particular, Gurnah illustrates how colonial histories and conflicts define the trajectories of the characters, while fragments of the past continually reappear and shape the present.

Gurnah’s story provides an evocative account of the afterlives of colonialism and the structuring role that the colonial experience continues to have in the present. In doing so, it speaks to concerns regarding the coloniality of global politics that have recently moved beyond their critical origins (e.g. Grovogui, 1996) to find space in mainstream journals (Gani and Marshall, 2022; Weber and Weber, 2020). These research interests, that have long been central to post- and decolonial perspectives, have led to a wider reckoning with the formative role-played by colonialism, imperialism and racism in the formation of the contemporary global order and the discipline of International Relations. A key theoretical problem when reckoning with the heritage of colonialism is how to account for its ongoing impact in the present. Simplistic accounts tend to either imply that colonialism is something that has been relegated to the past or a straightforward continuity between colonial times and the present. While the majority of scholars would undoubtedly recognise the problematic nature of such temporal narratives, developing more sophisticated accounts of the impacts of colonialism has proven difficult (Tucker, 2018).

In this article, we theorise the concept of afterlives as a way to understand how the colonial past lives on, without reducing continuities to temporal indifference or a linear progression from past to present. As of yet, IR scholars have engaged with the concept of afterlives only to a limited extent (for exceptions, see Odysseos, 2019; Salem, 2020), using it only in passing or as a general analogy (see, for instance, Sylvester, 2013). Drawing on two key usages of the term in the broader post- and decolonial literature across disciplines, we propose to understand afterlives simultaneously as echoes and aftermaths of the past. In simultaneously capturing the echoes and aftermaths of colonialism, the notion of afterlives provides tools to conceptualise the ‘colonial present’ (Gregory, 2004) beyond straightforward narratives of continuity/rupture. Building on this, we conceptualise how the aftermaths and echoes of colonialism live on in the present.

First, the concept of afterlives captures the multiple immaterial echoes that ideas, events, cultural artefacts and infrastructures have after their inception (Draper, 2012). For example, scholars evoke echoes to trace the multiple ways in which defining events shape and are imagined in the present (Ross, 2002; Salem, 2020). While echoes may be employed more generally with reference to reverberations of the past in the present (Nicolaïdis et al., 2014), we use it more specifically to account for reverberating imaginaries and affects. These reverberating imaginaries and affects can inform particular dominant recountings of events, as well as the subterranean connections through which that which has been apparently erased and forgotten lives on (e.g. Ross, 2002). The notion of echoes thus helps to unravel the diverse resonances of and lives taken on by events or ideas. Sara Salem (2020) approaches these echoes through the very useful notion of haunting (see also Gordon, 2008), which she argues ‘pushes for an understanding of how legacies of some projects persist, but not always in tangible ways’ (Salem, 2020: 257). Recalling the sonic dimension of echoes serves to attune us to their immateriality. An echo, as Alexander Weheliye (2005: 335) notes in his discussion of musical epigraphs of the African American Sorrow Songs at the beginning of each chapter of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), is ‘the lower sonic cum spectral frequencies of the past [. . .] the clashing reverberations of a dead sound that lives in its aftereffects’ to resist finitude. The concept of echoes draws our attention to the immaterial ways in which colonial imaginaries and interventions are reproduced or appropriated by different actors in the present.

Second, the concept of aftermath can be used to describe the material reality of particular practices, projects or infrastructure – the aftermath is what is left behind after a project’s apparent demise. Scholarship illuminating aftermaths in this way often interrogates remains of shattered dreams and aspirations through infrastructural ruins (Aitken, 2020; Dawney, 2021; Jerrems et al., 2022; Lisle and Johnson, 2018) or eroding and decaying materials left behind (Finiguerra, 2023; Soto, 2018). In doing so, the concept of aftermath captures how past projects or practices continue to structure the present for those living in them. As such, aftermaths underline the residue of past structures that fail to leave us. For example, scholars have sought to interrogate how historical configurations such as slavery (Hartman, 1997; Sharpe, 2016; Weinbaum, 2019) and the plantation (Beckford, 1972; Le Petitcorps, Macedo, and Peano, 2023; McKittrick, 2013) continue to structure politics and possibilities in the present through their material embodiments. Saidiya Hartman (Hartman, 2021 [2007]), for example, employs the concept of afterlives to capture such aftermaths lost in conventional accounts of the legal emancipation of slaves, problematising transition narratives and lazy distinctions between before and after slavery. She illustrates how the legacy of slavery lives on through various forms of ‘unfreedom’ suffered by the descendants of slaves, defined by ‘premature death, social precarity and incarceration’ (p. 6). Others focus more explicitly on the spatiality (McKittrick, 2013) and materiality (Stoler, 2008) of aftermaths, pushing us to stay attuned to what the reconfiguration of spatial and material forms may tell us about the persistence of ‘imperial formations’ (Stoler, 2008: 194) in the present. Aftermaths thus conjure up material afterlives, both in the sense of ruined landscapes and infrastructural projects but also durable social structures associated with them. Attention to aftermaths attune us to how the world quite literally structured by colonialism lives on despite official decolonisation.

In this article, we propose that echoes and aftermaths live on via the acts through which ideas, events, but also material structures and cultural artefacts are recreated. In doing so we draw attention to the agential dimension of afterlives, that is to say, the acts through which the past is made to live on. Walter Benjamin points towards this agential dimension when he refers to the continuation of the life of a text through the act of translation as an afterlife. Caroline Disler has noted how the agential understanding of afterlife employed by Benjamin has been rendered in French as ‘survie’ (survival) by Derrida, ‘survivance’ (survival or succession) by Lamy and Nouss and ‘vie continuée’ (continued life) by Rand (Disler, 2011: 202–203). The French survie seems to neatly capture the agential dimension of afterlives. It leads us to questions regarding the specific actions that are required or taken for something to survive or be perpetuated. One of Henri Lefebvre’s core concerns in La Survie du Capitalisme, for example, is to account for what is done to ensure the continued reproduction of capitalist relations of production, despite constant transformations and contradictions as well as declarations of their imminent death from Marxist quarters. Stuart Elden (2004: 236) points out a productive ambiguity around the concept survie, that can mean both survival and afterlife, in this case. Edward Said’s (1983) conceptualisation of travelling theory is also particularly relevant for shedding light on the agential dimension of afterlives, tracing how particular theories are translated across situations and historical contexts. Theorists in Said’s formulation bend, renovate and supplement particular formulations to make them speak to circumstances and theoretical problems that they did not necessarily intend to address. In doing so, they inaugurate a new stage in the life of a theory, its afterlife.

In the next two sections of this article, we develop this theorisation by focusing on the afterlives of state failure as an indicative way of how the concept of afterlives can be operationalised. It allows us to ask how the failed state paradigm is informed by prior modes of colonial intervention as well as how it continues to inform thinking about interventions. At the same time, it provides a framework through which we trace the changing articulations – ‘imperial formations’ in Stoler’s words – through which these persist in the present. These formations are revealed through shifting oppositions between civilised/uncivilised, strong/weak, vulnerable/resilient that reflect different stages of the life and afterlives of state failure. It is in this way that we offer a theorisation of the fragile cities agenda as one of the afterlives of the failed states agenda.

From failed states to fragile cities: inquiring into the afterlives of an agenda

Genesis: the coloniality of state failure

It is difficult to trace the actual birth of a concept – or a research agenda – as most ‘new’ concepts are produced through iterative reformulations of past concepts. ⁴ Having said that, it is possible to trace the first coherent use of the concept of failed states (and associated terms) in the 1980s, and it was mostly circumscribed to Africanists at the start (Bueger and Bethke, 2014: 44). The emergence of the concept can be seen as the renovation of colonial logics, indeed it is initially formulated with decolonisation in mind. One, mostly overlooked, figure in this early debate is Robert Jackson, who with Carl Rosberg, offered a conceptualisation of what they labelled ‘quasi-states’ and ‘weak states’ (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982; see also Migdal, 1988). Contrary to scholars operating in the 1990s, the colonial roots of the concept are not overlooked by Jackson and Rosberg. For them, imperial sovereignty equated ‘positive sovereignty’, and such a regime was subsequently challenged by the decolonisation period of the 1950s and 1960s. Pre-colonial and post-colonial Africa – each in their own ways – did not embody empirical sovereignty as a constitutive principle; both orders are populated by examples of ‘quasi-states’ or ‘weak states’, with populations not enjoying many advantages traditionally associated with independent statehood. We also see versions of this argument appear in the work of other influential English school scholars at the time (see, for instance, Bull and Watson, 1985: 425-235). As such, the distinctive character of colonial rule in this early iteration of the failed states agenda is that of establishing order where there apparently was none.

The early rise of the failed state agenda was built around the rearticulation of colonial logics. For some commentators then, the rise of the failed states agenda responded to the collapse of the colonial state or colonial apparatus (Mazrui, 1995); the ‘faux states’ (Brooks, 2005: 1168) that are the post-colonial African states never really existed empirically speaking. Conversely, long periods of colonial administration were seen as drivers of stability for the post-colonial African state (Clapham, 2003: 9). If weak states were previously allowed to be colonised or otherwise dismembered by powerful states, the new decolonised states were allowed to survive despite utterly lacking empirical sovereignty. As Sebastian Mallaby and others argue, breaking from the imperial past, ‘‘Orderly societies’ now refuse to impose their own institutions on disorderly ones’ (Mallaby, 2002: 2; Cooper, 2003: 17). The romanticisation of the colonial period will open up new perspectives on interventions in a neotrusteeship fashion.

Consolidation: the rise of the failed states agenda

Echoes of this first iteration of the agenda will populate the rise of the concept in policymaking after the Cold War, remade by a mix of scholars and practitioners ready to seize the opportunity of the changing security landscape. As such, the failed states agenda crystallised in the early 1990s, especially through the agenda-setting piece by Helman and Ratner (1992–1993), a crucial contribution from William Zartman (1995), and further popularised by Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN (Gros, 1996: 455). Around the same time, the CIA commissioned a group of researchers to put together the State Failure Task Force, established in 1994 and hosted by the Centre for Global Policy at George Mason University (Esty et al., 1995). In light of these developments, one can certainly say that ‘failed states have made a remarkable odyssey from the periphery to the very centre of global politics’ (Amburn, 2005; Paris, 2011). In the heyday of the agenda, especially after 9/11 attacks, most of the Western states listed failed states as major national security threats. The World Bank started including failed states considerations around 2002, with a focus on ‘low-income countries under stress’ or LICUS, which gave formidable opportunities to the organisation to widen its mandate to include security issues (Bueger and Bethke, 2014: 47). Following suit, and further consolidating the fragile states agenda, normative actors developed state failure or state fragility indexes, including the OECD with its highly regarded Fragile States reports since 2005, or Foreign Policy and Fund for Peace with its Failed States Index also since 2005. This period is marked by an increased usage of the concept in United Nations documents from 2001 onwards, peaking in 2004, corresponding with the international interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq (Clausen and Albrecht, 2022: 7; see also Bueger and Bethke, 2014: 43). After 2004, the concept of failed state starts to give way to the concept of fragile state, indicating a bifurcation of the agenda towards development issues (Kaplan, 2008), and in general a reaction to growing contestation of the agenda but without a major modification of the normative underpinning (Lemay-Hébert, 2019). As previously mentioned, the failed states agenda is intrinsically a way to see the world, and more precisely, to legitimise interventions. The concomitant prescription in this iteration of the failed states agenda is then for the community of developed states to ‘fix’ failed states (Ghani and Lockhart, 2009; Kaplan, 2008), in so doing removing all agency from the subjects (or targets) of the agenda.

Crisis: situations of fragility and the co-option of the critique

Critical voices about the ranking of states and the inherent normative assumptions behind this started getting louder, ⁵ especially from self-labelled fragile states grouped under the G7+ established in 2011. For G7+ countries, ‘the term “fragility” is itself highly controversial, and many prefer to focus on “resilience” as the positive inverse of fragility’ (G7+, 2013). In doing so, the G7+ was directly challenging the measurements and the ‘standard yardstick’ used to assess fragility (G7+, 2013; Rocha de Siqueira, 2022: 121), especially the figure of the strong Western state as a yardstick for state capacity. The failed states agenda will operate a significant conceptual turn under the thrust of epistemic actors who were largely behind the earlier conceptualisation of the failed states agenda (notably the OECD, 2015). For instance, the OECD decided to jettison past conceptualisations and use the concept of ‘states of fragility’ in an effort to overcome the traditional single categorisation of ‘fragile states’ (OECD, 2015: 13). In so doing, fragility becomes a combination of exposure to risk and insufficient coping capacity of the state. In parallel (and belatedly), the Fund for Peace abandoned the concept of failed states in 2014 to use the concept of fragile states – the Failed States Index then became the Fragile States Index. For Fund for Peace, ‘strong states’ or general mentions to state strength have disappeared from the language – leaders in the table are simply deemed ‘less fragile’ or ‘more sustainable’ (Fund for Peace, 2021: 12). Even the CIA-sponsored State Failure Task Force changed its name to the Political Instability Task Force. Hence, state failure was seen as too normatively-laden, and the concept of state fragility came to be replaced by new concepts such as ‘states of fragility’ (plural) or ‘situations of fragility’ (also plural). This coincided with a general retreat from the modern certainties of identifying and listing fragile states to grappling with the challenges of building resilience in the Global South and the Global North alike (African Development Bank (AfDB), 2015; UNDP, 2016).

As made explicit already, this second iteration of the failed states agenda comes with a notable shift towards resilience (Lemay-Hébert, 2019; Pospisil and Kühn, 2015), co-opting the critique in the process and focusing on how situations of fragility arise from risks and vulnerability. ⁶ In this approach, there is a general recognition of how little predictive power of the traditional iteration of the failed state agenda had, prompted by the failure of all indexes to predict the ‘Arab Spring’ (Kaplan, 2014: 51). Crises can affect all states, not simply ‘developing’ states, and capacity for resilience becomes the key difference between sustainable and fragile states (Kaplan, 2014: 52). As stipulated in the US Global Fragility Act for instance, ‘every country, including the United States, has experienced fragility’. The aim is then ‘to shift the stigma of fragility’ towards an affirmative agenda grounded on partnerships for peace and resilience (US Department of State, 2022). In certain regards, this approach appears as a dead-end for policy-making. Each state is seen as a unique case, needing a ‘customized approach’ (Kaplan, 2014: 60), which would amount to a return to a mythical and romanticised Lawrence of Arabia, knowing all elements of local cultures ‘at his fingertips’ (Hulsman, 2005). As the OECD notes, following this approach, it is ‘difficult to come up with sound, replicable approaches that donors can take in programmes of development assistance’ (OECD, 2010: 120).

Afterlife: fragile cities

While the failed states agenda can be understood as an afterlife of colonialism, we have illustrated how this has been progressively developed through various transformations, each reconfiguring the aftermaths and echoes of previous iterations. In this final section, we concentrate on one specific afterlife of the failed state agenda to further trace the trajectory of colonial logics. The fragile cities agenda operates a synthesis between precepts of the initial iteration of the failed states agenda and the concomitant rise of the resilience approach to understanding state fragility. With the fragile cities agenda, the scale of analysis shifts from the state level to city level (Nogueira, 2017), with echoes resonating from the different iterations of the failed states agenda. This rearticulation is of course built on the general focus on ‘rapid, unregulated urbanisation [as] a key driver of fragility’ (OECD, 2018: 32) already present in the original failed states agenda, with different focuses and emphasises being put on this ‘threat’ depending on the specific iteration of the agenda. ⁷ Chronologically, the birth of the fragile cities agenda corresponds roughly with the beginning of the crisis of the previous iteration. Temporally, however, it activates a condensation of past iterations that gives new life to diverse fragments of these. As such, beyond a new iteration of the discourse of failed/fragile states, outlined chronologically above, it gives a new life, an afterlife, to these logics that begins to develop in parallel.

The concept of fragile cities first cursorily appeared in 2010 (Duijsens, 2010: 361), with visible links to the previous concept of ‘fractured cities’ (Koonings and Kruijt, 2007) or ‘divided cities’ (Walton, 1976). At the same time, the UN Inter-Agency Standard Committee (IASC) organised an event around ‘Meeting Humanitarian Challenges in Urban Areas’ (IASC, 2010), which contributed to the ‘turn to the city’ moment for international actors (Jerrems, 2020; Reid-Henry and Sending, 2014: 431). UN-Habitat (2007) had earlier released a report defining urban vulnerability and resilience. However, it is in 2012 when the ‘fragile cities’ agenda takes clearer shape, notably around the work of Robert Muggah both through the Igarapé Institute in Brazil (Muggah and Savage, 2012) and in collaboration with the UN University Centre for Policy Research (De Boer, Muggah, and Patel, 2016). Muggah and the scholars gravitating around the fragile cities index have presented different definitions of the concept, all of which reflect different facets of the modernistic failed states agenda. One of the key definitions of the fragile city understands it as ‘a discrete metropolitan unit whose governance arrangements exhibit a declining ability and/or willingness to deliver on the social contract’ (Muggah, 2014: 345). This is textually the same definition as the traditional definition of the fragile state put forth by DFID, with a specific focus on ability and willingness to care for citizens. The functionalist approach is also present and central to the agenda: the aim of cities, like states, is to ‘fulfil core functions’ (De Boer, Muggah, and Patel, 2016: 2). Actually, in a pure institutional focus, it is deemed that ‘when city institutions are unable to provide minimum public goods – law and order, basic services, resilience to sudden onset or long-term climate change – fragility deepens’ (Muggah, 2017). Elsewhere, Muggah defines fragile cities as entities where the social contract crumbles and ‘anarchy rules’ (Muggah, 2015b), here reproducing the normative characterization of fragile states as zones of anarchy (discussed later on). In an earlier related conceptualisation, Norton proposes the notion of ‘feral cities’ (Norton, 2003); cities with more than one million inhabitants located in a failed state (Norton, 2003: 98). ⁸ Here, the filiation with the fragile states agenda is even more apparent: feral cities are simply cities located in failed states. They are natural extensions of the lack of empirical sovereignty displayed by failed states. For Muggah, in contrast, ‘cities are never either entirely fragile or completely resilient. Rather, properties of fragility and resilience coexist in all cities’ (2023: 222; see also De Boer, Muggah, and Patel, 2016: 3). As such, resilience and fragility are not antonyms, and no city is exclusively fragile or resilient. Thus, both resilience and fragility are dynamic properties ‘to which there is no particular end-point or absolute ‘state’’ (De Boer et al., 2016: 3).

While modernistic notions of state failure are all but abandoned in the international sphere, they are taken up at a new scale in the fragile cities agenda. As such, concepts – and more so conceptual agendas – do not tend to die out but are rather reconfigured (as is the case of fragile cities through more recent proposals, for example, Patel et al., 2020). One way to apprehend the afterlife of the failed states agenda through the concept of fragile cities is to focus on two specific fragments, which we will discuss in turn: the pathologisation inherent to the agenda, and the visualisation and colour-coding used to display state failure and city fragility.

Fragment (1): the echoes of pathologisation and their rearticulation

The afterlives of the failed states agenda can be apprehended through the concomitant pathologisation of the subjects of the agenda, opening up possibilities for interventions along with the echoes of colonisation reverberating over the years (Hughes and Pupavac, 2005; Pupavac, 2002; Visoka and Lemay-Hébert, 2022: 63–65). Through pathologisation and its effects, we see various figures of fragility – the strong and the weak – deployed across time, connecting the different iterations of the agenda together. We argue that three sets of figures structure the afterlives of the failed states agenda: (1) the twin figure of the civilised and barbaric state; (2) the twin figure of the Western state and the ‘dysfunctional’ state in the Global South; and (3) the twin figure of the resilient and the vulnerable. Through these dichotomous iterations, we can apprehend the echoes of coloniality within discussion on fragile cities. This is exemplified by the ‘new barbarism’ and its colonial foundations, where fragile cities are deemed as violent anarchical locales, slums to be fenced off. Second, fragile cities are also considered as ‘areas of uncivility’ that need to be fixed through interventions.

The first iteration of the failed states agenda – its conceptual foundation – relies on the twin figure of the civilised state defined in contradistinction with barbaric or uncivilised practices (Salter, 2002). The colonial project is structured around a specific ordering of world politics – one specific system for ‘developed’ or ‘civilised’ states, and another system for the world to be colonised. As such, Europeans were ‘adopting one kind of relationship, equality and mutual interdependence, as the norm in their dealings with each other, and another, imperial paramountcy, as normal in their relations with non-Europeans’ (Keene, 2002: 6; see also Anghie, 2005: 40; Becker Lorca, 2014: 45-49). The most telling contemporary example of this comes from the work of James Lorimer (1884: 101), for whom humanity was divided in three different categories (or spheres), associated with different degrees of recognition: full political recognition for civilised humanity; partial political recognition for barbarous humanity; and mere human recognition for savage humanity. The division between civilised and non-civilised humanity can also be found prominently in John Stuart Mill’s work (Jahn, 2005), which served as a premise to construct his own justification for European imperialism. One could certainly argue that liberal imperialism was subsequently translated into the liberal interventionist agenda (Morefield, 2014: 229–231), and provided the genesis of the failed states agenda.

In the second iteration of the failed states agenda, the twin figure of the civilised and barbarian is translated into the twin figure of the strong, developed, Western state as the model to aspire to, and the weak or ‘dysfunctional’ state (Kaplan, 2008: 8). Here, one could hear the echoes of decolonisation and its challenge to the order of ‘positive sovereignty’. Strong states are located in the North (or West), covering broadly speaking OECD-DAC membership, and roughly mapping out to the former metropoles of the colonial era. Conversely, failed states are their ‘dark mirror image’ (Brooks, 2005: 1161), emerging from the decolonial space. Normatively, failed or fragile states are the troubled children of the international community – they are usually associated with widespread crime, violent conflict or severe humanitarian crises, which makes them lose any privilege associated with being a member of the international community (Etsy, Goldstone and Gurr, 1995: 1). This specific iteration of the failed state agenda is imbued with a pathologisation discourse (Call, 2011: 303; Manjikian, 2008; Wai, 2012: 37) that helps support policy prescriptions. State failure is likened to a ‘serious mental or physical illness’ (Helman and Ratner, 1992–1993: 12), a ‘long-term degenerative disease’ (Zartman, 1995: 8), which justifies conservatorships from the international community. ‘Dysfunctional governments are like sick people’ (Ellis, 2005: 136), and indexes of state failure are seen as a ‘typology of pathology’ (Patrick, 2007: 650). This pathologisation will enable actors to order the world in their (distorted) image, ‘the gap between ideals and empirical reality is treated as justification for interventions which aim to close this gap’ (Eriksen, 2011: 231).

In the third iteration of the failed state agenda, we see a further translation emerging with the twin figures of the resilient and the vulnerable. Strong states are defined as resilient, able to withstand shocks; however, all strong states have a bit of weakness in them. In a sense, it is a very different understanding of decolonisation and its repercussions that is echoing in this iteration of the failed states agenda. If the previous iteration of the failed states agenda was informed by the negative sovereignty regime behind the new world order emerging after decolonisation and the need to establish new trusteeships over failed states, this new iteration is informed by the lack of interest displayed by colonial powers once the economic costs of colonialism became too much, the resistance on the ground became too strong and the many contradictions of the normative agenda of civilising ‘natives’ became too apparent.

The fragile cities discussion presents a number of echoes made up of fragments of the failed states agenda. The first and the most obvious is the continuity of the fragile cities agenda with the ‘new barbarism’ thesis (Duffield, 1996; Salter, 2002: 150–153; Visoka and Lemay-Hébert, 2022: 92–93), with strong colonial echoes. Robert Kaplan came to be the standard flag-bearer for such analyses, normalising conflicts in the Global South where ‘criminal anarchy emerges as the real ‘strategic’ danger’ (1994). This anarchy in the ‘new barbarism’ thesis is very Hobbesian, where life is ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Kaplan, 1994). As such, and in continuation of this, fragile cities are understood as ‘insecure, disorganized and violent’ (Muggah, 2015a: 19), where civil society is fractured around ‘clan, geographic or ethnic lines’ (Norton, 2010: 60). All these accounts present a reductionist reading of urban space, in conjunction with a fear of social disorder, ‘pejorative in its implications for those individuals deemed to be the bearers of urban anarchy’ (Reid-Henry and Sending, 2014: 429). Such accounts have clear colonial lineages through which spaces of danger and exception are constructed (Manchanda, 2020). Nevertheless, as in the case of colour-coding these discourses are translated to a distinct spatial scale in line with broader conceptions of transformations in global politics.

The emerging preoccupation with urban spaces is tied to what is perceived as the challenges posed by the rise of slums and the ‘urbanisation of poverty’ (UN-Habitat, 2003). The concept of ‘slums’ usually has derogatory connotations, suggesting settlements needing replacement (Reid-Henry and Sending, 2014: fn 7), of an urbanisation in the Global South ‘portent of a dystopian future’ (Rodgers, 2010: 1) portrayed as anarchical and brutal, and in general reify a history that rests upon the ‘city of the south’ as its proxy subject (Rao, 2006: 227). These territories are understood primarily through the concept of ‘absence’ – social services are all but non-existent and there is no social safety net (Norton, 2003: 98) and there is no security, just anarchy (Norton, 2003: 97). The Hobbesian state of nature is even invoked here – for Norton, ‘security [in feral cities] is for the most part a matter of individual initiative’ (Norton, 2003: 98).

The second consideration is the characterisation of fragile cities as ‘problems to be solved’, areas of uncivility that need to be fixed through interventions, again echoing the main purpose of the failed states agenda as previously discussed. In general, one of the associated benefits of moving the fragility discussion to the city scale is that ‘cities are easier to fix than states’ (Kaplan, 2013), opening up interventionary possibilities for policy actors. Traditionally, the problems associated with ‘feral cities’ such as urban decay and insecurity have been seen as domestic issues, ‘best dealt by internal security or police forces. That will no longer be an option’ (Norton, 2003: 100). As such, ‘feral cities’ will be battlegrounds of the future (Norton, 2010: 51; see also Kilcullen, 2012: 28). Issues emerge however, constraining interventionary dynamics, and echoing fragments of the different iterations of the failed states agenda. More precisely, traditional claims of sovereignty, with governments not acknowledging the loss of sovereignty over ‘feral cities’ (the ‘so-called sovereign state’ – Norton, 2010: 74), are seen as posing a significant obstacle to collective international action (Norton, 2003: 106). This is actually an extension of the Robert Jackson’s thesis as discussed in the first iteration of the failed states agenda, who posited that if weak or failed states were previously allowed to be colonised or otherwise dismembered by powerful states, the new decolonised states were allowed to survive despite utterly lacking empirical sovereignty (Jackson, 1990: 80). Negative sovereignty principles freeze power politics and inter-state competition, which in turn hinder any positive solutions for failed states. Resistance to the ‘fragile cities’ label for that specific reason is acknowledged by Muggah for instance. If the label of ‘fragile cities’ is quick to be invoked in certain quarters to unlock resources (not unlike the ‘fragile states’ label – see Fisher, 2014), in other quarters it is resisted as it is seen as potentially ‘giving rise to new forms of (international and domestic) interventionism’ (Muggah, 2014: 348). Following how the logics of pathologisation are rearticulated in the fragile cities agenda provides additional insight into the afterlives of the failed states agenda. In this sense, we can see that the failed states agenda has not died or gone away but rather entered another stage of its life, its afterlives.

Fragment (2): visualisation, mapping and colour-coding

Another way in which the afterlives of the failed states agenda can be apprehended is through the visualisation of failed states and associated problems, operated through mapping but also, more specifically, through colour-coding. Colour-coding in the mapping of failed states has gone through different iterations, starting with the emphasis on the colours of blue and green as indicators of state strength and the overwhelming focus on the colour red as the colour of fragility or failure, echoing colonial practices of the production of blank spaces in cartographic imaginaries or racialised zoning practices, to a very noticeable disappearance through the crisis moment of the failed states agenda. Interestingly enough, in the fragile cities agenda, the colour codes are resurrected and rearticulated at a new spatial scale.

Colour plays a central role in how we make sense of the world, and colour-coding is of particular significance for security matters (Andersen et al., 2015; Lemay-Hébert, 2018). It forms part, not only of particular systems of meaning (Andersen et al., 2015) but also has a performative dimension (Vuori et al., 2020) and is intimately tied up to how we make sense of the world (Du Plessis, 2021). In addition, maps – as referent objects – but more importantly mapping processes can be apprehended as straddling the (post)colonial divide, with current practices building on past, colonial, practices; in other words, current practices are the material and conceptual afterlives of colonial forms. This has been discussed through the study of a wide-array of techniques that have migrated from imperial to post-imperial politics (a process labelled as ‘colonial reflection’ by Branch, 2014: 101), including ‘cartographic territoriality’ (Branch, 2014) or the production of ‘blank spaces’ in cartographic imaginaries (Capan and dos Reis, 2023). We argue here that colour-coding in mapping practices can be similarly apprehended. The divide between ‘black town’ and ‘white town’ (Nightingale 2012), ‘racialised zoning’ (Fanon 1967 (1961)) rooted in the ‘global colour line’ as powerfully discussed by W. E. B. Du Bois at the turn of the century (1903, v), has migrated into new focuses on ‘red-zoning’ (Jerrems and Lemay-Hébert, in press). As Ruben Andersson (2022) argues, ‘the color code may have changed from black to red, yet the pattern echoes down the ages as dangerous Otherness at the heart of the West is again being telescoped out to depictions of faraway danger’ (p. 15). Attention to the colour-coding of fragility provides insight into the changing spatial dimensions of how it is understood and governed, and how its codes are fragmented and rearticulated across situations and historical contexts. The original colour-coded mapping of state fragility, built around the traffic light system, has morphed and fallen out of favour in the resilience turn of the agenda, only to re-emerge in the fragile cities agenda. In this afterlife, the homogeneous colouring of state territories gives way to the colour-dots differentiating urban spaces.

If the colours used to depict state strength or state resilience show more variation, some using blue, white or green, ⁹ red is and has generally, and consensually, been considered the colour of failure and fragility. For the Fund for Peace, dark red is the highest degree of ‘very high alert’ (for Syria, Somalia and Yemen in the 2021 report; see Fund for Peace, 2021). ¹⁰ For the World Bank’s list of Fragile and Conflict-affected situations, high-intensity conflicts are depicted in dark red (including Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen; see World Bank, 2022). The State Fragility Index (which has not been updated since 2017) also colour-codes countries according to state fragility, using dark red for countries listed as ‘extreme’ in the fragility index (Marshall and Elzinga-Marshall, 2017: 28, 45). The Country Indicator for Foreign Policy Fragility Index (also not updated since 2017) colour-codes fragile states as red (Carment et al., 2017: 20). ¹¹ In its second iteration as previously discussed, most of the actors behind the normative turn towards resilience consciously moved away from colour-coding and the ranking of states in their translation of state failure. In its first States of Fragility report, the OECD colour-coded in a map with the colour black ‘fragile states and economies’ (OECD, 2015: 15). In 2016, the OECD used different shades of blue for all graphs and maps (OECD, 2016: 87) or purple/pink in 2018 (OECD, 2018: 85). In its latest report, it doesn’t even represent fragility visually on a map (OECD, 2020: 24).

In the fragile cities agenda, the colour codes are resurrected and rearticulated at a new spatial scale, also depicted in red. For the index of fragile cities, resilient cities are represented with a dark blue dot, and fragile cities, dark red (De Boer et al., 2016: 9). ¹² For Norton, the traditional traffic light colouring scheme is retained: so-called ‘healthy’ cities are labelled with the colour green (also labelled as ‘no danger’ – Norton, 2010: 57); ‘marginal’ cities are depicted in yellow; and cities ‘going feral’ are depicted in red. Cities ‘in the green’ (Norton, 2003: 101) have healthy government, economy, service and security provision; cities ‘in the red’ or ‘cities in the red zone’ (Norton, 2003: 102) have none of that. In the middle, cities ‘in the yellow’ (Norton, 2003: 101) display some of the worrying tendencies of feral cities. The colour codes are drawn directly from past work on fragile states – with red, yellow and green colour codes used to depict the ‘states’ health’ (Norton, 1997: 84). At the same time, colour-coding fragile cities are also understood as mosaics and are expected to contain more than one colour (Norton, 2003: 103), with some enclaves of feral cities displaying ‘green conditions’ (Norton, 2003: 103). As such, insecurity in ‘fragile cities’ is relative, with a ‘Manichean landscape of ‘safe’ gated communities and ‘violent’ slums’ (Muggah and Savage, 2012).

Tracing colour-coding through distinct iterations of the failed-state and fragile cities agendas provides a visual entry point into the notion of afterlives. The point is not that colour-codes have had an unchanging meaning across the diverse lives and afterlives of the agenda. Rather ideas and forms of classification informing successive agendas have emerged through displacements, disappearances and reappearances. In the case of colour-coding, the initial system of signification underwent a transformation, or even disappearance, before being recreated at a reduced spatial scale. Fragments of an older logic are adapted in the face of emerging problems and as a result are given new life.

Conclusion: assessing the continuity of colonial formations

We have argued in this article that the concept of afterlives is more than a stylistic metaphor. Drawing from post- and decolonial studies, we forward a conceptualisation capturing both the echoes and aftermaths of colonial times, which can be apprehended through agential iterations or rearticulations. The concept of echoes draws our attention to the immaterial ways in which colonial imaginaries and interventions are reproduced or appropriated by different actors in the present, whereas the concept of aftermaths describes the material reality of particular practices, projects or infrastructure – the aftermath is what is left behind after a project’s apparent demise. Focusing on the iterative translations of the failed states agenda enables us to see the continuity of colonial logics – the ‘colonial present’ (Duffield, 2005; Gregory, 2004) – despite various apparent ruptures. In other words, and to grasp one specific aspect of the colonial present, this enables us to highlight the fact that Orientalist discourse ‘is not just restricted to the colonial past but continues even today’ (Breckenridge and van der Veer, 1993). The notion of afterlives, we hope, sheds an additional light on the ideational and material aspects perpetuating specific worldviews (Grovogui, 2002: 321).

Through the exploration of the various iterations of the failed states agenda, we have hoped to underline the various echoes and aftermaths which came to structure the agenda over time, from its genesis, to its critique and the recent focus on fragile cities. It is important to note that the fragile cities agenda as discussed in this article is but one of the various afterlives of the failed states agenda. Another parallel and resolutely modern afterlife of the agenda lives through the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, partly premised on conceptualisation of Ukraine as a failed state, or Saudi Arabia’s use of the concept to justify the intervention in Yemen (Clausen, 2019). Yet another afterlife is the increasing use of the concept to reveal the West’s own frailties, with a specific focus on the United States or the United Kingdom as failed states, a condition laid bare by the perceived failure of public health policies to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the focus on fragile cities is particularly emblematic of the scalar move present in the failed states agenda, with interesting connections to the colonial past informing the colonial present.

While some would like to draw a line between colonialism and contemporary interventionism (Paris, 2010: 348–350), others point to the fact that it is not enough to voice a preference for human rights as a gambit to avoid the stigma of empire (Bain, 2003: 172). In fact, the various iterations of the failed states agenda can be seen as reflecting the wider IR scholarship and its pro-imperialist, Eurocentric approach grounded in colonial theories after the end of the Cold War (Hall and Hobson, 2010: 242). However, the rearticulation process is never a linear transformation. Each iteration brings its own conceptual apparatus, informed by previous echoes and aftermaths, as demonstrated in the brief historical overview of the failed states agenda developed in this article. Continuation then appears through the careful act of bringing the various fragments together, highlighting their iterative rearticulations and helping unearth their afterlives. In the specific context of the fragile states agenda, we have traced two specific fragments: the pathologisation discourse and practices operating through the agenda, and the visualisation and colour-coding which come to display the choices made by actors when mobilising the agenda. Other fragments – and other afterlives – could have been highlighted and remain to be unearthed and explored. Such fragments do not provide the complete story then, as Gurnah reminds us, but rather reveal something about how the colonial past haunts, and is rearticulated in, the imperial formations of the present.