Fragile states or failing development? : États fragiles ou développement défaillant?

Force in the pursuit of the direct national interest comes easier, and since the end of the Cold War, the more prominent instances of the resort to major force by groups of states acting together — notably in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq — were initiated without the formal consent of the international community acting through the Security Council and were primarily a response to the perceived thr [...] The 1999 NATO attack on Serbia was certainly a response to state failure and to the growing peril of the people of Kosovo, but the perception that NATO’s reputation and future would be fatally affected if it ignored the descent into chaos in its own backyard was a major factor — and the prominent reliance on aerial bombardment owed much more to the convenience of the interveners than to the safety [...] One need look no further than the West’s interest in Afghanistan in October 2001 to confirm that when the wealthy and powerful countries of the global North consider the phenomenon of failed states, the focus is the security requirements of the wealthy North rather than the security needs and well-being of the people of failing states. [...] When the United States, in the operation it called Enduring Freedom (OEF), first led the attack on Afghanistan, the formal mission was the defence of the United States and the legal framework was the right of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. [...] At the strategic level the paper echoes, but in more restrained terms, the analysis accompanying the Foreign Policy/Fund for Peace failed states index, referring to “the growing capacity of weak states to endanger Canadian strategic interests and threaten the welfare and security of Canadian citizens.”19 The same theme is reflected in the IPS attention to wider issues of regional stability and the