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and political disputes. As Part I discussed, moments and entry points are available
for taking deliberate actions to bolster a society’s resiliencies and strengthen its
conflict-handling capacities so as to avoid the degenerating effects of increasing
polarization. If they pay close attention to the many watch lists of fragile states and
conflict early warning systems, decisionmakers have considerable time and multiple
opportunities to test the lessons from experience by acting before it is much
harder to contain crises and escalatory cycles. During this period, close analysis
can be done of each state in terms of the nature, degree, and sources of the particular
state’s fragility involved, such as distinguishing among states that are “willing
but not able,” “unwilling and unable,” and so on, as a guide to reshaping the
policies toward them.
This shift in focus requires certain changes in current perspectives and tendencies.
Policy toward fragile states should not be conceived as special or extraordinary
actions that are taken on top of the ongoing normal policies toward such
countries. The most workable approach to addressing fragile states differently is
to infuse appropriate criteria, analysis, and procedures into existing programming
by the agencies that already operate on the ground, rather than relying on special
units that enter the picture only when alarm bells go off. As developed below, making
a distinction between normal policies in these settings and special interventions
taken at particular crisis moments is misleading. The last minute responses
will often either be too late to avoid incurring huge costs from major interventions
or the awaited dramatic events may never happen because a state’s deterioration
is gradual. Rather, actions toward fragility should be woven into the fabric of and
modify current policies so that they become mainstreamed. This shift means getting
out from under the domination of media discourse about “hotspots” and
“flashpoints,” as well as corresponding notions such as “rapid response” and “civilian
surge.” Those terms frame the problem only as a matter of reacting to major
crises or cataclysms.
The shift also means less emphasis on the nearly exclusive US focus on the
costly job of repairing already failed post-conflict states. The US cannot afford
to play catch-up to recurrent problems of state failure. Redefining the problem
could also reduce the tendency to use up scarce resources on oversubscribed
"aid darlings" on the one hand, and to deprive "aid orphans" on the other. It
would help to reduce the volatility of aid by modulating it over the years more
appropriately in relation to the capacities within given countries. Finally, this
reorientation debunks a widespread fallacy that has unnecessarily inhibited preventive
approaches to conflict and state failure; namely, the assumption that acting
proactively cannot show results because if one succeeds, nothing happens. It
is then argued that few incentives exist for taking preventive action because no
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