State Fragility

When states become fragile, many challenges ensue for international peace, development and sustainability efforts. State fragility, however, appears in different forms.

The new online data tool Constellations of State Fragility allows policy makers, researchers and practitioners to see how 173 states of the world scored in the period 2005 – 2020 in terms of their capacity, authority and legitimacy. Building on these three core functions of the state, Constellations of State Fragility distinguishes between six different types of fragility: countries such as Brazil, according to this analysis, mainly struggle with violence or crime, exposing low state authority; others, such as Ghana, are in this perspective characterised by weak state capacity, leading to deficiencies in basic public services. The focus on dominant patterns of fragility sheds a new light especially on those states that usually find themselves in the middle section of linear rankings of state fragility.

With the online tool Constellations of State Fragility, users can visually explore the worldwide constellations of fragility, download graphs and maps, compare countries’ capacity, authority and legitimacy scores and access data for 10 underlying indicators, such as child mortality or a state’s monopoly of violence.

The database and online tool has been developed within the research programme Transformation of political (dis-)order at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) and with financial support from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.