Third World Quarterly

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The resilient state: new regulatory modes in

international approaches to state building?

Jan Pospisil & Florian P. Kühn

To cite this article: Jan Pospisil & Florian P. Kühn (2016) The resilient state: new regulatory
modes in international approaches to state building?, Third World Quarterly, 37:1, 1-16, DOI:
10.1080/01436597.2015.1086637

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Third World Quarterly, 2016
VOL. 37, NO. 1, 1–16
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1086637

The resilient state: new regulatory modes in international

approaches to state building?
Jan Pospisila and Florian P. Kühnb
a b
Austrian Institute for International Affairs (OIIP), Vienna, Austria; Institute for Political Science,
Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

‘Resilience’ has quickly risen to prominence in international security Received 26 May 2015
and development circles. In recent years it has found its way into Accepted 21 August 2015
political discourse on state building and state fragility, triggering a KEYWORDS
vast but often conceptually indistinct examination of the subject. fragile states
Given its meaning in policy publications and guidelines, ‘resilience’ resilience
tends to eschew a static conceptualisation of statehood, turning failed states
instead to a more dynamic, complex and process-oriented rendering security
of state–society relations. This illustrates a conceptual shift from ‘failed state-building policy
states’ to ‘fragile states and situations’. It also transforms the concept of
‘failed state’ as a mere threat perception – with ‘stability’ as its logical
other – into ‘fragility’ as a particular form of social and political risk.
This paper analyses the concepts in 43 policy papers, focusing on
the nexus of ‘resilience’ and ‘fragility’ in international state building,
and assesses potential consequences. What does ‘resilience’ – as the
opposite vision to ‘fragility’ – in fact mean? What is the practice derived
from this chimerical state of states?

Introduction
The term ‘resilience’ has made its way into the statebuilding vocabulary: policy documents
like the 2009 European Report on Development, or the OECD DAC paper From Fragility to
Resilience introduce – and use – resilience as a key concept in international state building.1
Since the 2011 state-building guidance from the OECD DAC, the concept has been power-
fully endorsed in the international state-building discourse. As a consequence, an increasing
number of actors has turned to talking about and ostensibly planning resilience support,
notably the European Union in its Action Plan for Resilience in Crisis Prone Countries from 2013.
Resilience has turned into a tool of rhetoric to frame the international state-building
agenda, mostly used in line with definitions such as that given by the DAC, according to
which ‘resilient states […] are capable of absorbing shocks and transforming and channelling
radical change or challenges while maintaining political stability and preventing violence.
Resilient states exhibit the capacity and legitimacy of governing a population and its terri-
tory.’2 As clear as this definition may sound, the meaning, as well as intended addressees and,

CONTACT Jan Pospisil [email protected]

Jan Pospisil http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9898-739X
© 2016 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
2 J. Pospisil and F. P. Kühn

consequently, options for international engagement the concept opens nevertheless remain
hazy, contradictory and disputed. Following the path of resilience discourse, we intend to
track analytical and policy consequences from this opaque meaning of the term ‘resilience’:
who is to be made resilient? Is it the state – as the OECD DAC definition implies? Is it state–
society relations (or ‘political settlements’, about to become the conceptual framework for
research and policy), societies as a whole, or communities, as David Chandler recently sug-
gested?3 Even if an addressee is defined and agreed upon, what does resilience mean?
Can it be measured and how should it be applied in policy development in the first place?
As the next chapter of state-building endeavours, resilience has entered international par-
lance in full force. It is now time to find out what it is meant to do, who uses the invocation
of resilience for which purposes and what the practical consequences, eg programmes of
international intervention, are.
This paper adds no additional meanings to the term ‘resilience’, nor does it attempt to
decide definitely whether resilience is aimed at state institutions, state–society relations or
social orders. Instead, it elaborates the particular features and aspects resilience has intro-
duced to the state-building debate. After analysing resilience as a specific (new) tool for
state-building practices, we ask what the emergence of resilience tells us about changing
international state-building policies: is resilience a marker for conceptualising statehood in
different terms? What has changed in international state building, and how are these changes
reflected in the concept of resilience?
To find answers to these questions, we analyse 43 key policy documents from the past
15 years. The aim is to uncover the unfolding history and quality of the discourse on fragility
and resilience. We discuss whether this discourse enables the development of new modes of
regulating statehood in transnational policy design4– mainly, of course, in the OECD world
in its relation to peripheral statehood.

State-building research revisited

Statehood and subsequent questions of state building have always been relevant in inter-
national relations. Despite shifting cycles of focus, the state has been the centre of political
inquiries since it was famously ‘brought back in’ in the mid-1980s.5 Practically the end of
the Cold War opened up new avenues of international engagement with statehood – in
particular where it soon became perceived as weak. On an academic level this watershed
resulted in challenging the central role the state held in earlier IR approaches from different
perspectives.6 Resilience, we maintain, is a new step in framing and packaging ‘the state’ and
what international actors expect it to do. In this section we trace the evolving topics, from
institutional approaches to ‘fragile states’ and prepare the ground for analysing resilience
as a new vision in state-building policy.
A quarter of a century of increasingly open intervention in (primarily peripheral) statehood
has shown that no easy fixes are likely. The introduction of resilience into state building, and
the new language it ushered in, demonstrate how dynamically understandings of the state
are adopted, through several stages, lines and ‘generations’ of discourse. Scholarly research
has been closely tackling the practical questions of state (re)building. As Bueger and Bethke
point out, the ‘failed state’ concept is a joint product of policy and academia.7 Security and
development actors, in particular, aimed to learn how to practise interventions more suc-
cessfully. In many cases such interests have been supported by research grants – conceptual
 Third World Quarterly 3

work has been conducted or commissioned by agencies like DIFD, the European Union
and the World Bank, or the CIA-funded State Failure Task Force.8 Carment et al. lament ‘lack
of theorizing’ in fragile states research as a result of tight connections between practition-
ers and academic research.9 They locate the ‘fragile states’ concept as complementary to
‘developing states’ and ‘democratizing states’, with an intersection that they frame as ‘weak
states’.10 Chandler interprets such a framework as a movement ‘toward a common secu-
rity–development paradigm’,11 strongly intertwined with ‘post-liberal governance’ imple-
mented in the institutionalist paradigm that state-building interventions follow,12 as Ghani
and Lockhart’s ‘Fixing Failed States’ demonstrates in particular.13 Such collaboration between
the now Afghan president and the policy consultant Lockhart in developing a state-building
framework shows the strong linkage between academia and policy.
It is thus safe to assume that resilience likewise is a product of these epistemic structures
of knowledge production. In the face of increasing disenchantment with straight-forward
state building, resilience evolved as a shift of vision, away from sturdy state institutions
towards including societal forces which, according to common criticism, earlier state-build-
ing concepts were all too often ignoring.14 Asking how to build states, most accounts of state
building approaches failed to focus their attention on the very concepts intrinsically linked
to this question, like, for example, ‘fragile states’. ‘For a majority of scholars, these concepts
are not of interest as objects of study’, Bueger and Bethke note.15 They analyse the evolv-
ing ‘fragile states’ concept and demonstrate which scholarly works proved to be the most
important at a particular time for establishing the concept (with Zartman’s 1995 publication
on ‘collapsed states’ probably the most influential16).
A recent Third World Quarterly special issue on fragile states as a ‘political concept’ empha-
sises the strong role of development policy actors in concept elaboration and development,
in particular the World Bank,17 European Union,18 and OECD. The International Network on
Conflict and Fragility (INCAF) at the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) proved to
be particularly influential. Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu demonstrate this with an actor-based
analysis, revealing close personal links between scholars and DAC officials, and the vigorous
attempts by the OECD to shape this discourse.19 In the following, we expand on this anal-
ysis, scrutinising how resilience came to be viewed as a solution to all the problems older
state-building approaches were unable to solve. While the history of the concept and the
high degree of policy involvement are revealed, we explore how ‘fragile states’ have arrived
at ‘resilience’. To trace this process, we unpack policy discourse, showing how policy actors
approach conceptual discussions more schematically compared with academic debates.
Without neglecting the manifold problems resulting from the search for quick solutions,
particularly in terms of implementation, such a focus allows us to analyse systematically how
a concept developed. The following section of the article thus traces the history of resilience
empirically, focusing in particular on the development policy realm, since development
policy epitomises the civilian efforts of state- and peace building.
Assessing the conceptual development of resilience within state building, 43 key policy
documents covering the past 15 years have been analysed (Appendix 1). These documents
represent six key international actors from the multilateral (the OECD DAC and the World
Bank) and the bilateral (Germany, the UK and the USA) realms, as well as the European
Union.20 All documents were subject to a software-assisted topical analysis, consisting of a
structural coding process designed to identify similarities and differences in the meanings
attached to key terms. The analysis situates resilience within older, more established terms
4 J. Pospisil and F. P. Kühn

Table 1. Four generations of state-building policy.

First generation: Second generation:- Third generation:- Fourth generation:-
conflict resolution failed states fragile states fragility/resilience
Approach Violent conflict causes Types of state failure Types of state fragility Diverse situations of
state failure fragility

Causes Root causes of conflict/ Unilinear explanations Multilinear causes Complexity/hybridity

trigger factors cause (institutional failure) (governance,
conflict to turn violent institutional capacity,
participation…)

Main lines of Stabilisation Institution building, State building on Strengthening resil-

intervention operations/conflict capacity building various levels (chan- ience of state–society
prevention and trans- (state, civil society) nelling, etc) relations, resilience/
formation inclusiveness of politi-
cal settlement

Exemplary DAC Guidelines on Aktionsplan ‘Zivile Fragile States Strategy DAC Policy Guidance
document Conflict, Peace and Krisenprävention’ (USAID, 2005) ‘Supporting Statebuild-
Development (1997) (Germany, 2004) ing’ (2011)

like ‘state failure’ and ‘fragility’. We are thus able to trace resilience’s particular history, and
the methods and practices used and aimed for in practice.

The fragility–resilience spectrum in state building

State failure and state fragility are terms that deal with a similar phenomenon. However, they
hardly refer to the same cases, or to the same structural framework. Most significantly, they
are located within a certain historical disposition. Fragility is the younger term, in use since
roughly the early 2000s, while the history of the concept of state failure can be traced back to
at least 1992, when ‘failed states’ were introduced as part of increasing IR threat-mongering
by the famous Foreign Policy article of Helman and Ratner.21 Carment et al. therefore speak
of two generations of approaches to the phenomenon of state failure. The first generation,
exhibiting a simplistic assumption of ‘failed states’ needing to be stabilised, ‘tends to focus
on unilinear causal explanations, in which a variety of factors cause either conflict or under-
development, which in turn leads to fragility, failure, or collapse of the state’, while second
generation approaches, in contrast, ‘explicitly recognize the diverse nature of fragility and
failure’ and ‘attempt to incorporate both structure and agency’.22
Resilience then, one might assume, should be the child of what Carment et al. call the
‘second generation’. Earlier, unilinear causality of ‘failed states’ would find its expression in
equally unilinear cures like military-led stabilisation efforts, and building working state insti-
tutions, which would then guarantee state stability (as the opposite of state failure). Beyond
such approaches resilience can be analysed as the opposite vision to fragility. In order to
turn fragility around and transform fragile states and societies into something ‘resilient’, a
much more complex package needs to be formulated, targeting agents as well as struc-
tures, along with their interrelations within the wider normative setting of statehood at the
international level.
Our analysis of policy documents supports Carment et al.’s assessment on a general
level. However, it reveals in more detail the importance of further fragmenting the history
of state-building policy. When we look beyond a simple mentioning of the terms (‘failed
 Third World Quarterly 5

states’, ‘fragile states’, ‘resilience’) and take into account the meaning, definitions and ­analysis
attached to them, we can distinguish four generations of state building, presented in
Table 1. As policy implementation tends to be slow and gradual, key policy papers, guidelines
and strategies express the changes more concisely than those used by Carment et al., who
relied on a much larger and less focused variety of policy documents.23
The first generation starts at the early stages of the development–security nexus in the
heyday of conflict prevention.24 In the late 1990s this nexus was the catchphrase that encom-
passed all other elements of working in violent and conflict-ridden environments, a Leitmotif.
Questions of state failure existed at that time, but were perceived as a sub-feature of violent
conflict. That a state fails in the course of violent conflict could be avoided, after all: ‘In the
case of “failed states”, or in countries where certain areas are controlled by non-government
or anti-government authorities, local level, non-state mechanisms may be the most effective
means through which peacebuilding and conflict management can be animated.’25
While conflict resolution was in full bloom, the concept of ‘failed states’ developed rather
quietly, in particular in the national security realm of the USA. As early as 1994 the CIA
launched a large-scale research project called the ‘State Failure Task Force’, located at George
Mason University, which published its first report in 1995.26 In 1997 ‘failed states’ were men-
tioned in the US National Security Strategy, although under the heading of ‘regional or
state-centred threats’ (the Strategy in general focused more on rogue than on failed states27).
Another such niche was formed by the governance departments of the development agen-
cies, set up as a consequence of the ‘good governance’ debate of the early 1990s: in 1993
USAID’s Center for Democracy and Governance unveiled in its strategic plan the view that
‘the recent phenomenon of “failed states” with no functioning governmental systems has
caused widespread political instability and large-scale economic collapse […] Helping to
restore functioning governments and respect for human rights in those countries poses
special challenges.’28
Causes and consequences were reversed compared to previous conflict prevention: it was
not violent conflict that caused state failure (and hence state failure would diminish if the
violent conflict was transformed); rather state failure virtually inevitably led to violence.29
Furthermore, ‘failed states’ added an important diplomatic tool: by creating a link to good
governance, democracy and human rights, so-called ‘difficult partnerships’ (or rogue states
in the more straightforward US language) could be included in the programmes, adding a
pronounced political spin. Within the second generation (which had its breakthrough fol-
lowing 9/11 and the Afghanistan intervention),30 countries prone to violent conflict, without
functioning state institutions, those – in the technical language of the World Bank – ‘under
stress’ (LICUS), and the opponents of the ‘coalitions of the willing’ (to stay within the meta-
phors of the early 2000s) could be dealt with under the same heading.
Perhaps most crystalline, the German Aktionsplan ‘Zivile Krisenprävention’ of 2004 rep-
resents best the shift from conflict prevention to state failure (and the subsumption of the
former within the latter).31 The strategic vision is prototypical: (re-)establishing reliable state
structures, defined along the cornerstones of the rule of law, democracy, human rights and
security, as well as the promotion of peace potentials within civil society.32 Hence, dealing
with state failure was a public effort aimed at working state institutions along an interna-
tionally agreed normative framework. Conflict prevention remained present, although as
a private, almost second-order civil society enterprise. Remarkable in the Aktionsplan is
the intrinsic linkage of ‘peace’ with ‘stability’.33 Despite Roger Mac Ginty’s argument that
6 J. Pospisil and F. P. Kühn

stabilisation ‘lowers the horizons of peace’,34 the notion of stability became a central point of
reference in German state- and peace-building policies, mainly for the military. ‘Stabilisation’
gained in importance in the subsequent years of the ‘state failure’ (but also the subsequent
‘state fragility’) discourse, particularly in US and UK strategies.
Interestingly, despite the increasing popularity of the term ‘failed state’, the second gener-
ation proved to be short-lived. As early as 2003 USAID laid the foundations for the future shift
to ‘state fragility’: it decided to develop a ‘fragile states strategy’, which was to become the
main reference for the third generation. Preparing this strategy, the Center for Institutional
Reform and the Informal Sector (IRIS) at the University of Maryland was consulted by USAID’s
Bureau of Policy and Program Coordination to prepare definitions of, and a methodology
for, dealing with fragile states.
The published report was a result of this consultancy and introduced three important
aspects into the debate on state fragility: first, it defined fragile states as a multidimensional
problem, but still as a problem related to states which could be subject to a typology: ‘states
that are “failing,”“in failure,” or “recovering from failure,” may be considered as all – to varying
degrees – fragile states.’35 Second, a so-called ‘matrix for state assessment’ was introduced,
which – as an important step for later stages of the state-building debate – contained legiti-
macy as one of its dimensions. The matrix encompassed – on the y-axis – the four dimensions
of core state activities (‘PESS’ – the political, economic, social and security dimension), and
divided these dimensions on the x-axis into the two categories of ‘effectiveness’ and ‘legiti-
macy’ (creating the so-called PESS-EL matrix36). Adding legitimacy appeared to be the main
message of the report: ‘we believe it is the preoccupation of donors with state effectiveness
[…] and the reticence to address state legitimacy – the perception of the various groups in
society that the state acts with a sufficiently encompassing interest – which constitute the
principal reasons for the lack of success in the past’.37
The third important feature of this report – one that did not make its way into USAID’s
Fragile States Strategy – was the first ever introduction of resilience into the state-building
discourse. Resilience was defined as the capacity to ‘withstand serious adverse pressures and
internal conflicts without failing’,38 by exhibiting effectiveness and legitimacy at the same
time. Not yet representing all features of current resilience discourse, this definition already
points to a more complex, socio-political and socioeconomic framing of causes not included
in state institutions. Resilience introduces criteria into the discourse which cannot be pinned
down materially, be measured, or be influenced by outsiders. The rhetorical device thus
allows the design of interventionist policies whose effects are a priori indirect. Causality of
interventions and effects is henceforth decoupled, the responsibility of external actors and
agencies obfuscated. The accentuation of legitimacy and the introduction of resilience are
characteristic of the debate at that time and lead the way to the fourth generation.
The typology, nevertheless, demonstrates a conservative moment, aiming to retain defi-
nitions and practices of former concepts, strategies and policies (which of course were up
and running on the ground). This is illustrated by the paradoxical division of effectiveness
and legitimacy into two analytical categories, while describing resilience as contingent on
the state being both. Bringing effectiveness and legitimacy together, however, also shows
the practical limitations of the second and third phases of state building. Culminating in sev-
eral ‘good enough’ concepts being developed, mainly ‘good enough governance’,39 stability
translated into another ‘good enough’ factor: ‘Stabilisation, state-building and peace-building
together combine short-term actions to establish good enough security and stability with
 Third World Quarterly 7

actions to address the structural causes of conflict, poverty and instability over the medium
to longer term.’40 Hence, Mac Ginty’s assumption of a ‘lowering of horizons’ is confirmed:
stabilisation remained a focal point at the very moment when it became visible that grant
expectations regarding state building could not be met.
In general the third generation of statebuilding remained a hybrid undertaking, split
between the strictly normative approach represented by the ‘failed states’ concept and the
much more fluid phenomenon of ‘fragility’. The move from third to fourth generation is
characterised by three interrelated passages: (1) ‘fragile states’ gradually turn into ‘fragile
situations’,41 and later into de-territorialised ‘fragility’;42 (2) ‘resilience’, which was just briefly
present at the beginning of the fragile states debate, returns to become the main catalyst for
the fourth phase; and (3) along with resilience, several conceptual figures enter the central
stage of analysis: state–society relations, which should be constructive and mutually reinforc-
ing, political settlements, which ought to be inclusive,43 and the adaptive capacity of (state
and social) institutions to cope with shocks and crises, the latter highlighted in particular in
the attempt to substitute the still popular stabilisation paradigm.44
In the course of this conceptual transformation of state building, resilience resembles a
virtual black hole: it incorporates humanitarian relief, development policy, diplomacy and
politics,45 and offers an integrating bridge for the efforts of state building, peace building and
conflict prevention. The latter is demonstrated by the merging of the once distinct working
groups at the OECD DAC that were tasked with such issues: the DAC Network on Conflict,
Peace and Development Co-operation (CPDC) and the Fragile States Group (FSG). The for-
mer existed as a taskforce from 1995 and became a network in 2001, the latter has existed
since 2003. In January 2009 both groups were integrated and transformed into the INCAF,
now the international ‘one stop shop’ for all questions concerning violence and state failure.
Furthermore, from the very beginning fragility became a trigger item for whole-of-gov-
ernment efforts of various varieties, in particular regarding international intervention.46 In
effect, while the discourse maintains that problems need to be tackled with much more
focus, and the mutual influences of policies must be pondered, resilience is yet another
step in broadening – without deepening – the conceptual understanding of interventions.
Resilience thus serves as a justification for intensified continuation of the usual practices of
intrusive and transformative activities.47
In addition to technical advantages, political reasons for the promotion of ‘resilience’ in
the debate on failed states and fragility can be identified, in particular the growing signif-
icance of the so-called ‘non-traditional donors’. These non-traditional donors, mainly the
BRICS countries, but also Turkey, Indonesia and the Gulf states, are highly sceptical about the
fragility concept and are ‘reluctant collaborators’ at best in the international endeavours of
peace- and state building.48 They view the label of ‘failed states’ with severe political reserva-
tions which, according to Richmond and Tellidis, is a major reason why the BRICS countries
in particular refused to sign the ‘New Deal on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding’ in Busan in
2011.49 Following Richmond and Tellidis’ assumption that the new donors focus on agenda
setting rather than on criticism of traditional donors,50 the ‘resilience’ approach with its far
wider – and also in parts radically different – agenda served to provide common ground.
Diverse interests require the amplification of reference concepts, and resilience allows
for all those actors new to the scene of international assistance to find their epistemological
niche. This is not to say that realist-leaning interest politics is taking over, but rather that resil-
ience has been turned into a tool to emphasise (murky) commonalities, while downplaying
8 J. Pospisil and F. P. Kühn

policy differences. Non-interventionism and a particular focus on humanitarian relief are

highly relevant aspects of ‘resilience’ both in the state-building context and of the – however
rudimentary – peace-building policies of the BRICS countries.51 Hence, they work as rhetorical
bridging factors in this regard. ‘Conflicting objectives’ are now an accepted reality in fragile
state policies, whilst at the same time, dealing with them productively remains unclear: ‘These
tensions [of competing priorities and agendas] must be recognized and acknowledged by
the international community even if they cannot be overcome.’52
However, this astonishing assimilating capacity of ‘resilience’ brings in its wake an increas-
ing vagueness on the practical side of this newly developed conceptual toolkit. The insights
from the policy papers suggest that vagueness and uncertainty in the application of the
fragility framework are a result of framings of statehood on the analytical as opposed to the
policy level. On the one hand, fragility – but even more so resilience – immediately opened
up a cleavage between the important bilateral actors within the OECD. The Anglo-American
countries showed instant flexibility and took up the concepts with enthusiasm but without a
strategic vision how to implement them.53 Others, in particular France and Germany, showed
reluctance (and at times even opposition) to taking up the approach. This cleavage resulted
in the ‘downgrading’ of resilience from being the main concept of overcoming fragility (as,
for example, in the European Report on Development) to being a very general ‘vision’, as in
the – internationally endorsed – OECD DAC state-building guidance from 2011.
Henceforth, strategies, methods and concrete policies tied to a resilience-based approach
developed a catchy, sophisticated and – by drawing heavily on the postcolonial debate –
remarkably critical discourse while remaining vague on concrete consequences for practical
engagement. Interventions were to be ‘integrated’, ‘foster constructive state–society rela-
tions’,54 political settlements and processes should be made ‘inclusive’,55 public expectations
should be managed,56 communities should be made resilient.57 All these efforts are embed-
ded in an increasingly complex rendering of legitimacy, which is now no longer focusing
primarily on the state, but also on ‘non-state networks and institutions’.58 In this way, the
causal factors of conflict and state fragility become merged into a tautological fundament
justifying interventions: lack of legitimacy causes conflicts, which in turn prevent social and
state institutions from gaining legitimacy.
Despite having its central position watered down under resilience, the state retains its
prominent position as the primary ‘other’ of state-building efforts. But it is now disempow-
ered from its position of equality in international relations and reduced to its ‘core functions’
(perhaps best represented in the chief slogan of the World Development Report 2011, ‘citizen
security, justice, and jobs’).59 Chandler’s argument that ‘the problematic of how states can
be strengthened through accessing and influencing social or societal processes has thereby
become positioned at the heart of the statebuilding problematic’ does indeed summarise
well the four generations analysed here.60 Nevertheless, the transformative impetus regard-
ing the relationship between state and society as rendered by the state-building community
fails to live up to this conclusion.
An overview of the history of the use of the term ‘resilience’ in texts on state building
reveals a much more hybrid (dis-)arrangement of distinct – and at times confusingly inter-
linked – strands of approaches that target either states and their institutions, societies or
both. The resilience umbrella provides the necessary framework for this ambiguity that is not
able to decide how to behave towards statehood, which is not functioning as it should be.61
In this light, resilience can be viewed as empty signalling, providing ‘kippers and curtains’
 Third World Quarterly 9

for continued practices which can be tailored to the institutional interests of implementing
agencies, to the (geo-)strategic visions of intervening states, and providing a back door for
recipients’ attempts to steer practices in favour of their individual or group interests.

Conclusions
A case can be made for resilience being the name of the last stage of the inherent state-build-
ing dilemma. Working with states directly and improving their institutional capacity (from
within or without) has largely proved unsuccessful: sustainable stability could not be
achieved; civil society as it was narrowly perceived in the form of professional and nice-to-
handle NGOs was – in most cases outside of Western contexts – simply non-existent, or, if
created from scratch, showed exactly the lack of capacity and social grounding that was to
be expected. Hence, no addressee for capacity building, no partner for social transforma-
tion remained; thus, institution building, as a consequence, has reached its logical end. This
proved to be the entry point for resilience and its quest for smart-sounding, but abstract
objectives: ‘inclusivity’ in the political settlement, ‘mutual reinforcing’ in the relationships
between (which kind of ) state and (which kind of ) society, and so on. As shown in Table 1, it
is no coincidence that complexity and hybridity with no clearly recognisable causal relations
have replaced explanatory factors for political problems: donor agencies have capitulated
intellectually to complexity in the face of a sustained lack of operational successes. In a
quest for pragmatism, the ‘good enough’ and the downscaling of ambitious programmes
to decentralisation and community-building efforts seem to be the only residual option
for international efforts. Thus, while not having to justify international practices and being
able to blame others, notably ‘local’ social figurations with an assumed propensity towards
violence, corruption and fiscal complacency, resilience allows for the solid maintenance of
the self-image as benign, neutral, and constructive.
Nevertheless, all such efforts are pressed into the normative corset that consists of two
cornerstones: first, although it hardly needs mentioning, interactions and partnerships are
required to adhere to the prescribed international norm system, in particular where human
rights and gender are concerned. By ‘limiting’ these norms to a red-line condition, inter-
national actors constrict politics to the liminal space of intervention.62 Instead of seeing
interventions as aiding that which is to be, international actors now assume that potential
partners have already internalised their norms – otherwise cooperation is ruled out as not
feasible. In the ‘old days’ of democracy and human rights promotion, it was presumed that
the potential partner had to learn human rights and gender-sensitive behaviour during the
state-building exercise; now, such behaviour has become a precondition for any outside
assistance in state building. Paradoxically, by showing cultural sensitivity and a willingness
to work beyond traditional avenues, donors have ensured that these norms gain an even
stronger role undergirding the practices of interventionist programmes. Hence, before
engaging with partners to increase resilience, partners must ensure that they are perfectly
aware of the normative expectations of internationally accepted, responsible conduct. This
again illustrates how responsibility for potential failure is transposed to those on whose
behalf intervention is made.
Second, the normativity of the international system is in full force. In state-building aid
effectiveness and the agreed and internationally endorsed principle of favouring the use
of partner country systems act as the main pivot. Paradoxically interventions work around
10 J. Pospisil and F. P. Kühn

state agencies to achieve better efficiency, often even implementing programmes through
their own aid industry. They remain dependent, however, on the legitimating structure of the
state to be able to justify such action and spending in the eyes of the public (ie taxpayers)
and recipient populations. As such, the exigency of having to rely on the state dictates which
channels should be used, even if this establishes and nurtures Potemkin, or façade, states.63
As if this dilemma was not challenging enough, the situation is further aggravated by fragile
states themselves, who are increasingly daring to take on this particular donor discourse: by play-
ing the same diplomatic game, the neglected partner governments of countries with a question-
able track record like Afghanistan, the DRC or the Central African Republic demand a much more
active role in the debate and in decisions about the allocation of funds – sometimes after decades
of unsuccessful cooperation. The so-called ‘G7+ group’ formed by those countries has become
the main vehicle for hijacking the donor discourse – and keeping the money flowing. Reduced
to the liberal core of assistance motivation, individualism and legal equality, interventions have
little guidance or strategic perspective for politics under such circumstances. ‘Best practices’ seem
to have become ‘any practice’ and, in a twist of history, subject countries are starting to usurp the
benefits of this inverted relationship between the global South and global North.

Acknowledgements
This work was produced in the context of the cooperation agreement of the Austrian Institute for
International Affairs with the Danube University Krems and supported by the Political Settlements
Research Programme at the University of Edinburgh. The authors like to thank Claudia Aradau for her
important comments on the draft version of this paper.

Notes on Contributors
Jan Pospisil is Research Fellow at the Political Settlements Research Programme at the University of
Edinburgh and Senior Researcher at the OIIP - Austrian Institute for International Affairs. He teaches
at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Vienna. His research interests are international
security and development policy, resilience, state legitimacy, state fragility and state building, peace
processes and theories of International Relations. He also works as a policy consultant.
Florian P. Kühn is Interim Chair for Comparative Politics at Magdeburg’s Otto von Guericke University.
His research focuses on risk and resilience, with a regional interest in South and Central Asia. His
work on security and development, state–society relations, political praxeology of state building and
intervention as well as narrative forms of politics has been published in International Peacekeeping,
International Relations, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Security and Peace and Peacebuilding, among
others. He is co-editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

Notes
European Report on Development; and OECD DAC, Concepts and Dilemmas.
1. 
OECD DAC, Supporting Statebuilding.
2. 
3. 
Chandler, “International Statebuilding.”
Hameiri, Regulating Statehood, chaps. 2, 3.
4. 
Evans et al., Bringing the State back In.
5. 
Buzan and Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies, 25–26.
6. 
7. 
Bueger and Bethke, “Actor-networking the ‘Failed State’,” 30.
Esty et al., State Failure Task Force Report, 49.
8. 
Carment et al., Security, Development, and the Fragile State, 4–5.
9. 
 Third World Quarterly 11

10. Ibid., 7.
11. Chandler, International Statebuilding, 6, Ghani and Lockhart, Fixing Failed States, 26.
12. Cf. Duffield and Hewitt, Empire, Development and Colonialism, 122–126, who link this
institutionalist paradigm to indirect rule. See also Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn, Illusion
Statebuilding, 41–46.
13. Ghani and Lockhart, Fixing Failed States.
14. See Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn, Illusion Statebuilding.
15. Bueger and Bethke, “Actor-networking the ‘Failed State’,” 1.
16. Zartman, Collapsed States.
17. Nay, “International Organisations and the Production of Hegemonic Knowledge.”
18. Grimm, “The European Union’s Ambiguous Concept.”
19. Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu, “The OECD’s Discourse.”
20. The United Nations and its sub-organisations were left out of the study, since they tend to avoid
working with diplomatically sophisticated terms like ‘failed’ or ‘fragile states’.
21. Helman and Ratner, “Saving Failed States.”
22. Carment et al., Security, Development, and the Fragile State, 16–17.
23. See ibid., 22–54.
24. Pospisil, Die Entwicklung von Sicherheit, 107–109.
25. OECD DAC, DAC Guidelines on Conflict, 37.
26. Esty et al., State Failure Task Force Report. The significance of this research project can be
determined by the fact that it is still up and running, and is presently in its sixth phase under the
heading ‘Political Instability Task Force’. See http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/political-instability-
task-force-home/.
27. White House, A National Security Strategy, 7.
28. USAID, Strategic Plan, 5.
29. This reveals a basic anthropological understanding very much akin to that of Thomas Hobbes,
in that, absent a Leviathan, violence is not only inevitable but what most people will be happy
to engage in.
30. Cf. Bueger and Bethke, “Networking the Failed State,” 24.
31. Regierung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Aktionsplan.
32. Ibid., 2.
33. Ibid., 1.
34. Mac Ginty, “Against Stabilization,” 26.
35. Goldstone et al., Strategy Framework, 3.
36. A similar matrix was used by DFID in its 2005 strategy, Why we need to Work more Effectively in
Fragile States: the y-axis consists of the factors ‘state authority for safety and security’, ‘effective
political power’, ‘economic management’ and ‘administrative capacity to deliver services’; the
y-axis consists of the two dimensions ‘capacity’ and ‘willingness’. DFID, Why we need to Work, 8.
37. Center for Institutional Reform, PPC IDEAS Annual Report, 27.
38. Goldstone et al., Strategy Framework, 38.
39. DFID, Why we need to Work more Effectively in Fragile States, 20. See also Kühn, Creating Voids.
40. DFID, Building Peaceful States and Societies, 37.
41. Cf. OECD DAC, Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States.
42. For example, European Report on Development.
43. For example, OECD DAC, Supporting Statebuilding, 11, 13.
44. For example, BMZ, Development for Peace and Security, 10.
45. For example, European Commission, Action Plan for Resilience, 4–6.
46. For example, Patrick and Brown, Greater than the Sum?; and OECD DAC, Principles for Good
International Engagement.
47. Kühn, “International Peace Practice,” 27.
48. IDS, “Beyond the New Deal,” 1.
49. Richmond and Tellidis, The BRICS and International Peacebuilding, 4.
50. Richmond and Tellidis, “Emerging Actors,” 565.
51. Ibid., 576–577.
12 J. Pospisil and F. P. Kühn

52. USAID, Statebuilding in Situations of Fragility and Conflict, 24.

53. This might also be because all the relevant concepts have been prominently developed by
British and US scholars, eg OECD DAC, Concepts and Dilemmas, 4.
54. OECD DAC, Supporting Statebuilding, 62.
55. DFID, Building Peaceful States and Societies, 6.
56. Ibid.
57. BMZ, Strategy on Transitional Development Assistance, 5.
58. OECD DAC, The State’s Legitimacy, 41–46.
59. World Bank, World Development Report 2011, 145.
60. Chandler, International Statebuilding, 4.
61. Cf. Kühn, “The Peace Prefix.”
62. For the concept of liminality, see Smirl, Spaces of Aid, 42–45.
63. See Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn, Illusion Statebuilding.

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 Third World Quarterly 15

Appendix 1.Primary documents included in the analysis

Institution/ Pre-2001 Pre-FSP Post-FSP Recent
period
DAC P1) OECD DAC P4) OECD DAC 2007: P6) OECD DAC 2011:
1997: DAC Principles for Good Supporting Statebuilding
Guidelines on International Engage- in Situations of Conflict and
Conflict, Peace ment in Fragile States & State Fragility
and Development Situations
Co-operation
P2) OECD DAC P5) OECD DAC 2007: P7) OECD DAC 2013: Fragile
2001: Helping Whole of Government States 2013
Prevent Violent Approaches to Fragile
Conflict States
P3) OECD DAC
2001: Poor
Performers

EU P8) EU 2001: EU P9) EU 2003: A Secure P10) Council of the P14) Council of the EU 2011:
Programme for Europe in a Better World EU 2007: Council Council Conclusions on
the Prevention of Conclusions on an Conflict Prevention
Violent Conflicts EU Response to Situa-
tions of Fragility
P11) Commission P15) European Commission
of the European 2013: Action Plan for Resil-
Communities ience in Crisis Prone Countries
2007: Towards an
EU Response to
Situations of Fragility
P12) EU 2008: P16) Council of the EU 2013:
Providing Security in Council Conclusions on an EU
a Changing World Approach to Resilience
P13) European Report
on Development

Germany P17) Regierung der BRD P20) BMZ 2007: P22) AA/BMVG/BMZ 2012:
2004: Aktionsplan ‘Zivile Entwicklungsorienti- Für eine kohärente Politik der
Konfliktprävention, Konflik- erte Transformation bei Bundesregierung
tlösung und Friedenskonso- fragiler Staatlichkeit
lidierung’ und schlechter Regi-
P18) BMZ 2005: erungsführung P23) BMZ 2013: Development
Übersektorales Konzept for Peace and Security
zur Krisenprävention,
Konfliktbearbeitung und
Friedensförderung
P19) BMZ 2006: P21) BMZ 2009: P24) BMZ 2013: Strategy on
Observations on Service Promoting Resilient Transitional Development
Delivery in Fragile States States and Constructive Assistance
and Situations State–Society Relations

UK P25) DFID 2005: Why we P28) DFID 2010: Build- P29) DFID/FOC/MOD 2011:
need to Work more Effec- ing Peaceful States and Building Stability Overseas
tively in Fragile States Societies Strategy
P26) Cabinet Office 2005: P30) DFID 2011: Governance
Investing in Prevention & Fragile States Department –
Operational Plan
P27) Secretary of State P31) DFID 2012: Results in
for International Fragile and Conflict-affected
Development 2006: States and Situations
Making Governance Work
for the Poor

(Continued)
16 J. Pospisil and F. P. Kühn

Appendix 1. (Continued).
USA P32) USAID 1994: P33) Goldstone et al. 2004: P35) USAID 2011: Statebuild-
Strategic Plan Strategy Framework for the ing in Situations of Fragility
Assessment and Treatment and Conflict
of Fragile States
P34) USAID 2005: Fragile P36) USAID 2013: USAID
States Strategy Strategy on Democracy,
Human Rights and Govern-
ance

World Bank P37) World Bank 2002: P40) IDA 2007: Opera- P42) World Bank and African
World Bank Group Work tional Approaches and Development Bank 2011:
in Low-income Countries Financing in Fragile Providing Budget Aid in
Under Stress States Situations of Fragility
P38) World Bank 2005: P41) World Bank 2007: P43) World Bank 2011: World
Fragile States P39) IEG Strengthening the Development Report
2006: Engaging with World Bank’s Rapid
Fragile States – An IEG Response and Long-
Review of World Bank term Engagement
Support to Low-income
Countries under Stress