In the early stage of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the conventional wisdom was that financial under-development of sub Saharan African economies may have been a bless-ing in disguise because it insulated them from the direct effects of the crisis. This paper argues that this may also make...

The late twentieth century witnessed significant shifts in the institutions and processes of governance in most members states of the OECD, as direct provision (sometimes characterised as welfare state governance) was, to some degree, displaced by the rise of the regulatory state. Changes in the...

Crucial social and cultural elements underpin state institutions and ensure that they function. This is true in any context, but it is even more important to understand and truly acknowledge in fragile ones. Conventional perspectives need to be broadened and need to look at the multiplicity and...

Analysing how the SSR process in CAR has been defined and then implemented, this article puts emphasis on the international interactions between institutional actors who may be geographically/territorially situated at different levels of the policy-making process in different places around the...

A significant number of –mostly Western European– countries have recently newly introduced citizenship tests or have added stricter requirements of civic knowledge to previously existing language tests. This working paper collects the contributions to a EUDO-CITIZENSHIP forum debate on...

How can development policy support weak, dysfunctional or fragile states? What constitutes state fragility and what are the appropriate instruments for state-building? After reviewing two recent quantitative indexes (The Index of State Weakness in the Developing World and The Ibrahim Index of...

This paper is intended to analyse two leading approaches that have guided international efforts to promote peace and development in conflict-afflicted fragile states since the 1990s, namely peace-building and state-building. In a relatively recent development, a growing number of donors has...

This paper explores the different ways in which citizenship has played a role in polity formation in the context of the European Union. It focuses on both the ‘integration’ and the ‘constitution’ dimensions. The paper thus has two substantive sections. The first addresses the role of...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how regional integration processes may contribute to statebuilding and promote exit from fragility for countries characterised by weak state institutions. After presenting a simple conceptual framework to discuss the effects of external and regional...

The challenge of institution building in African countries remains a major threat to the establishment of peace and justice, and the entrenchment of sustainable social and economic development. This may be attributed largely to the dynamic and complex social landscape of most African countries....