“Fragile states are the toughest development challenge of our era,” said Zoellick in his keynote address at the 50th anniversary conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Soldiers and aid workers need to cooperate to help the people in these countries shift from being victims to becoming the principal agents of recovery. Without this cooperation, efforts to save fragile states are likely to fail, and we will all pay the consequences.”
“… These situations require looking beyond the analytics of development – to a different framework of building security, legitimacy, governance, and economy. This is not security as usual, or development as usual. Nor is it about what we have come to think of as peacebuilding or peacekeeping,” said Zoellick. “This is about Securing Development – bringing security and development together first to smooth the transition from conflict to peace and then to embed stability so that development can take hold over a decade and beyond. Only by securing development can we put down roots deep enough to break the cycle of fragility and violence.”
Noting that the World Bank Group committed over $3 billion to fragile states or countries suffering from conflict, Zoellick described many of the challenges facing states, and outlined 10 areas to focus on. These ranged from building the legitimacy of states and rule of law; strengthened security; local and national ownership; economic stability and a healthy private sector; the political economy; coordination among institutions and actors; the regional context; and the need for long term commitment.
Zoellick called for better integrating the military, political, legal, developmental, financial and technical tools with a variety of actors, from states to international organizations, civil society to the private sector.
The World Bank Group estimates that one billion people, including about 340 million of the world’s extreme poor, are estimated to live in fragile states. Zoellick noted that these countries account for about a third of the deaths in poor countries from HIV/AIDS, a third of those who lack access to clean water, and a third of children who do not complete primary school. Fragile states have poverty rates averaging 54 percent, compared to 22 percent in other low income countries, he added.
Zoellick said the breakdown of states creates “waves of danger” for their regions and ultimately for the world, spawning diseases, outflows of desperate people, criminality, and terrorism. “…as the world witnessed seven years ago yesterday, broken states can be the weak link in the global security chain if they are infiltrated by terrorists who recruit, train, and prosper amidst devastation,” Zoellick said.
