Seth D. Kaplan

Bio: Seth D. Kaplan is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: International community & Poverty. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 18 publications receiving 198 citations.

Fixing Fragile States: A New Paradigm for Development

Abstract: List of Tables, Charts, and Maps Preface Acknowledgments Part I Introduction 1. Introduction: Why Fragile States Matter Part II Diagnosis 2. Fostering Development: The Missing Ingredients 3. Fragile States, Fractured Societies Part III Prescriptions 4. A New Paradigm for Development Part IV Application 5. West Africa: Stitching a Fragmented Region Together 6. The Democratic Republic of the Congo: Constructing the State Bottom Up 7. Syria: Countering Sectarianism with Unifying Institutions 8. Somaliland: Reconnecting State and Society 9. Bolivia: Building Representative Institutions in a Divided Country 10. Pakistan: Redirecting a Countrys Trajectory 11. Azerbaijan: Pressing Reform on an Autocracy Index

Identifying Truly Fragile States

Abstract: That the Arab Spring caught the world off guard is hardly surprising. Interpreting overt stability as a reflection of fundamental strength or resiliency has often set the international community up for surprise. Few forecast the dissolution of the Soviet Union, for example; far too few in Washington anticipated what would follow the invasion of Iraq. These are reminders that apparent stability can be little more than an illusion. The converse can be equally misleading. Just as the international community tends to see stability as strength, it often equates crisis with fundamental fragility. Many countries face episodes of crisis, some of which can even initiate transitions to new political orders. But not all such countries are structurally fragile, plagued by deeply entrenched sociopolitical and institutional problems. Some states pass through their fragile moments relatively easily, leveraging their assets to reorient themselves in more positive directions within reasonable periods of time. States that are fundamentally fragile, however, buckle under these crises, stagnating or spiraling into violence. Fragile states are not like other states. They function—albeit barely— according to a different set of sociopolitical dynamics. As such, they harbor uniquely formidable obstacles to stability, development, and democracy. Because of these problems, all transitions are not created equal, and the underlying strength or fragility of societies undergoing those transitions helps determine their success and, more broadly, the prospects for political and economic development.

Rethinking State–building in a Failed State

Abstract: As warships from a dozen nations patrol the waters off Somalia, trying to stem the piratical tide, the international community is once again trying to rebuild a centralized government in Mogadishu ...

West African Integration: A New Development Paradigm?

Abstract: Helping long‐troubled regions such as West Africa requires nothing less than embracing a new development paradigm. Instead of simply continuing to pump billions annually into the region's many dysfunctional regimes, local leaders and the developed world should focus on regionalism.

Fixing Fragile States

Abstract: FRAGILE STATES HAVE marched from the fringe to the very center of U.S. security concerns. Whereas once defense analysts worried only about competing powers such as the Soviet Union and China, now even the weakest of countries is considered a potential threat. "The events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states," the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy declared. Poverty may not turn people into terrorists, but "poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels." In a similar vein, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has declared, "Fragile states ... are now recognized as a source of our nation's most pressing security threats. There is perhaps no more urgent matter facing [us] than fragile states, yet no set of problems is more difficult and intractable. Twenty-first century realities demonstrate that ignoring these states can pose great risks and increase the likelihood of terrorism taking root." (1) We have, at least for the moment, stopped ignoring fragile states. Indeed, everyone seems to have an opinion these days on how to fix fragile states. President and generals, academics and aid specialists, even financiers and business executives are volunteering prescriptions for countries where the only growth industries are violence, corruption, and decay. Yet, for all the talk, there is little understanding of what ails places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, why past efforts at helping them have failed, and what ought to be done to turn them around. Moreover, despite the increasing awareness of the importance of fragile states to the West's own security and well-being, much of the tens of billions of dollars in aid spent attempting to reform these desperate places is funding policies that actually undermine them. What is lacking is an understanding of, or a readiness to acknowledge, one of the fundamental forces that drives development, which is the key to all state-building exercises. This overlooked ingredient is social cohesion. Rather than deal with this prerequisite for strong states, the West looks the other way and addresses important but essentially secondary issues. The World Bank focuses on economic restructuring, nongovernmental organizations focus on social programs, and aid agencies increasingly focus on administrative changes. All these reforms are desperately needed, to be sure, but all will fail, as they have failed in the past, to transform fragile states unless those states also possess social cohesion. Why this blind spot? One reason is that the economists who dominate the development field are temperamentally disinclined to think that a society's makeup can trump well-designed economic policies. Another reason is that contemporary development theories and practices are deeply colored by the multiculturalism that pervades academia, nongovernmental organizations, and the media; few specialists even consider the possibility that diversity might actually undermine cohesion and might thus be a fundamental cause of retarded development. A third reason has to do with the state-centric international system. Governments and supranational organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank, which together set the international agenda for failed states, are accustomed to formulating programs around states exclusively, and therefore often fall back upon generic models of analysis that disregard sociocultural forces. And a fourth reason is simply that the development field has become so specialized that few of the people who analyze individual problems or countries ever consider the system-wide factors that bring states tumbling down in the first place. For all these reasons, the international community has repeatedly ignored indigenous identities and social relationships and ha assumed that the structure of the state has little relevance to the problems that plague underdeveloped countries. …

Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice:

Abstract: ity between and within each country, the former allows the rich in both poor and rich countries to “intermingle” in the calculation of global inequality, which is then fully decomposable into the between and within country components. What the survey data show is that global inequality first increased between 1988 and 1993 and then decreased from 1993 to 1998, reflecting the stagnation of poor rural areas of China and India in the first period, and the slight catching up of poor rural areas in the second period. Furthermore, Milanovic shows that previous attempts at capturing this type of inequality reach conflicting conclusions regarding the trend, which in turn reflect different assumptions and data sources, most of which bias the calculated results downward. The final section discusses the future of global inequality, and what can be done to redress it. Where previous studies express confidence in a declining global inequality trend, Milanovic is less confident, suggesting that we can be certain only that inequality is high. Furthermore, since the trend depends heavily on the performance of one country— China, predictions about future trends are speculative at best. Milanovic is certain about two things. First, global inequality is immoral. Second, redistribution is possible and would be both moral and efficient to the development of humanity as a whole.

When Does Service Delivery Improve the Legitimacy of a Fragile or Conflict-Affected State?

Abstract: Received wisdom holds that the provision of vital public services necessarily improves the legitimacy of a fragile or conflict-affected state. In practice, however, the relationship between a state's performance in delivering services and its degree of legitimacy is nonlinear. Specifically, this relationship is conditioned by expectations of what the state should provide, subjective assessments of impartiality and distributive justice, the relational aspects of provision, how easy it is to attribute (credit or blame) performance to the state, and the characteristics of the service. This questions the dominant institutional model, which reduces the role of services in (re)building state legitimacy to an instrumental one. A more rounded account of the significance of service delivery for state legitimacy would look beyond the material to the ideational and relational significance of services, and engage with the normative criteria by which citizens judge them.

Development as a collective action problem: addressing the real challenges of African governance

Abstract: There is growing expert consensus that the better government that sub-Saharan Africa needs is not so easily identified with the usual concept of good governance. For some years, there have been calls for governance reforms to be based not on Northern ‘best practices’ but on case-by-case diagnostics, so that the priorities and modalities attain a ‘good fit’ with the particular needs and possibilities of specific countries.