E-grāmata: Managing State Fragility: Conflict, Quantification and Power

This book looks at the management of ‘state fragility’ and the practices and impacts of quantification over relations of power in international politics.

It argues that practices of quantification and classification of ‘fragile states’ are not a mere technicality. They emerge from the deep-seated uses of statistical reasoning; moreover, their political entrenchment in policy-making has impacts that can be extrapolated to the development-security debate more generally. The book suggests that quantifying and classifying practices constitute a style of thinking and doing political management of ‘fragile states’, which carries symbolic power. Through the subtlety and reasonableness of practical sense, symbolic power wins the complicity of those who seem least favored by it – as exemplified by the g7+ group of self-labelled and self-measured ‘fragile states’. The book broadly suggests that by looking at quantification as a technical and political practice, we can effectively engage with newly established types of transnational power and better understand how numbers can enable powerful practices of marginalization.

In that sense, the book analyzes important direct and indirect practices of ranking and categorization that help make of ‘state fragility’ what the book calls a measurable and manageable political truth. It looks at the relations between the World Bank, OECD and the g7+ to understand how this political truth is constructed, what power is mobilized in this construction and how these insights can help make sense of a now much quantified form of making policy. As such, the book aims at understanding how the variable ‘conflict’ influences the way development is currently practiced, reinforcing and modifying an already existent quantifying reasoning; and how this quantifying reasoning towards ‘fragile states’ opens space for certain appropriation of practices of power in a way that was or is not possible in relations of power centered in more direct forms of control.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, International Political Sociology, development studies, and IR in general.